[masraum]

Originally Posted by chrisf

At this point I feel as if i don't have any recourse. Just have to wait

Pretty much.

Recourse, order another and hope for the best or wait.



FedEx, in my experience is not as good as UPS, but I'm probably talking about FedEx Ground vs FedEx Express. I haven't received much via FE Exp over the years, but when I have, I believe it's been much better.

UPS is generally pretty good.

Yes, the package may bounce around to various locations that don't make any sense to you, but then it would be horribly inefficient to literally ship stuff door to door. There are very advanced algorithms that had laid out the most efficient way for items to be shipped. I'm sure it's primarily to balance speed/service and cost. Much like networking, in a lot of cases, the shipments are going to take routes that don't seem to make sense to us because they are not direct. In many cases, they are probably routed from local to regional to national hubs and then depending, they may route from one national to another national and then from there to another regional and then another local. I'm sure it's 1000x more complex than that, but I'm pretty sure that's the gist.

And I suspect every carrier has their own algorithms and they probably all work in a very similar way. Depending upon their focus and desires, I'm sure they can alter the speed/service vs cost balance too. And how much you pay for the service (extra speed) should alter the path. In my experience, UPS meets or beats their forecasted delivery date most of the time (my guess is at least 99%). FedEx is not nearly as good, but still probably somewhere in the 75% range.