Unbelievable Shipping Damage w/pics...

USPS to Canada has a smaller max size than domestic mailing. An inch bigger length or cir***ference would've dq'ed it. UPS would've been $100 at the size it was. Any bigger and it doubles.

Good tip on the concrete forms though. They are pretty stiff. I don't know that it would've helped in this case though. I mean, they bent a piece of steel at both ends. We're not exactly talking a piece of belt line trim here. This is a truck grill. And heavy at that.

Again, I say to all the "bad packing" posters, go out and try and bend a truck grill over your knee and report back. Imagine the force it took to cause that damage. No amount of packing would keep that from happening short of a 100 pound crate built with 2x4s. And that's really unreasonable when you factor in the costs involved with crating, shipping, and the price of the grill.

 

looks like they threw off a ship..and forgot to catch

 

You should have seen the bar back cooler I had shipped new it was dented and dinged but after 3 weeks we couldn't keep moisture it was shedding off the floor. UPS used a freight company that apparently didn't have a lift gate to fit it. They bashed it and broke the top seal. The same idiot came back to pickup the damaged one, as soon as I saw him I knew how the first one was damaged. He laughed about the packing too.

 

we build crates like that for the mentioned aircraft parts, and they still destroy them.

 

THAT would have been the proper way to pack it. Cardboard, tape (no mattr how many rolls, and bubble wrap just dont cut it.

 

Shoulda put it in a custom made ***anium case.....

 

9/10 times UPS will claim "improper packaging" unless you let the local UP$ $tore box it up.

 

Not really relevent to this post, I just have to give earl schieb an attaboy for the offer of the free replacement. He's offering parts for free to replace something that wasn't his just to help a couple of guys out! That's frickin' rad! If anyone lives near earl schieb please buy him a frosty beverage of his choise! Thanks man, guys like you make hotrodding what it is!

 

In my experience your REAL MISTAKE was labeling it FRAGILE - that's like putting a Bullseye on it!!! I shipped a guy a nice AD CLOCK once. I packaged the hell out of it - I then double boxed it and packed the hell out of it again. I tossed in some shock monitors I had form work I would have challenged anyone to break this and in reality that's exactly what I did because I too made the mistake of marking it FRAGILE. When the guy got it he could NOT believe it was broke - you could have dropped this off a building, but when there's a will there's a way. I will never again write fragile on anything. I bought a NOS hood molding once - the guy sent it packaged inside one of those super heavy duty cardboard shipping tubes. And yep you guessed it they folded that ****er in half. If I didn't knwo better I'd have thought they ran it over with a towmotor. Some peoples kids!

 

I have gotten to know are UPS driver pretty well over the pqast couple yearsand he has told me many time to be caucious when packing because the wharehouse guys generally dont't give a **** minimum wage is a killer in the shipping biz i guess

 

I'm done using the USPS. Shipped some control arms out and the box was beat to hell! Luckily control arms don't bend easily, so they were ok. Anything else wouldn't have survived... NEWMAN!!!

 

I found a couple of big shipping crates and I wish I could find a source for the wood in them for packages like this. Thin, light, but strong enough to nail some pieces into a frame to keep something like this a little more secure.

Looks like they tried to jam it someplace it wouldn't fit, which is what you should do if you don't get some satisfaction from USPS on it - jam it someplace on the USPS guy.

 

Brother i send out pinstriped framed panels all the time, they are ALWAYS well packed and the post office almost breaks every damn one of them. And that is just what they always tell you that it wasn't packed well
enough. Once they told I packed it to tight, one time they told me it wasnt packed tight enough. I wont send fragiles through usps anymore.

 

me too!!!!

 

must had marked it fragile.. they love to play baseball with fragile stuff, it was the us side, its america game.
I've had the same problem, something like this , I stcik 1/4 plywood in it.

 

oh man! thats friggin painful to look at!!

 

i ship out quite a few custom pinstriped and leafed motorcycle helmets and USPS detroyed one of them! I mean, this is a helmet, made to be able to take the force of a crash and they managed to kill it!! This is the only one out of 30 they have broken so far so I can't complain too much. I pack them in the same box they ship from the factory to the supplier and then to me.

josh

 

I mail ordered a bumper for my 64 Chevy pickup. One day a construction guy from my town called my home phone and said that he had just picked up my bumper. Literally picked up my bumper off the street. He was nice enough to just give it to me. I opened the box and the bumper had just one dent in it. I could have probably fixed it. Then I got a little mad. I looked down the street and there goes the U.P.S. truck. I got in my car and tracked down the driver of the U.P.S. truck and brought him back to my home to look at the dented bumper that he didn't know I had. All he could say was that he was having trouble with his back door and he had wondered where the bumper box went. Good thing the bumper went back because the chrome job ****ed anyway. Gary

 

Hell! At a dealership I worked at a S10 pickup came in on top of the transport for delivery with the roof laying in the bed of the truck! The driver raised the S10 up to get a car out from below and never let it back down. Then he drove under a bridge and the rest as they say, (and the new S10), was history.

 

Oh Christ, anyone who sells parts are going to spend all dam day building a exotic tomb for a 50 dollar freaking part??? Jeez

 

Buddy of mine shipped (DHL) an old boat outboard engine..when it got there it was in two pieces! What force does it take to break an outboard engine in two pieces!?..probably the same gorilla that handled that truck grille...

 

HOLY ****!!! I'm in the same situation! I bought a TT door that WAS almost perfect, factory paint with CW's hardware lettered on it. I was stoked about that find! The guy put in a cardboard box, scotch taped the end and let our "buddies in brown" take it from there. I now and the proud owner of a flat banana shaped door that survived 80+ years of the elements, but not a 8 day 400 mile joy ride from hell. That just ****s!!

 

It had to have been crushed by the force of a forklift, or a dozen OTR's (big aluminum wheeled containers loaded against it. Since I'm retiring, my last day as a Mail Handler at the USPS is tomorrow and although we do have some brain dead idiots that work there I've never seen anyone damage stuff on purpose but I have seen some really stupid people operating a fork lift in the last 27 years! I've had to unload some really ****ed up loads that come out of Des Moines and Omaha over the years and the truck drivers tell me the guys loading it should be fired for how they load stuff. There is no mercy with a 6000 pound fork lift with an idiot driving it. No excuses but they are everywhere, in the freight companies and other shippers. I've used them all with good luck unless it wasn't packed very well. I have had really good luck with Priority Mail (fast-2 to 4 days) if it isn't to big and heavy (it gets too expensive) because that stuff is handled by hand and and goes in a container to be flown instead of going on a truck. Bottom line is it should have never been damaged, it was packed well enough and there is no excuse for what was done to it. My apologies for what was done to your grill.

 

I used to have a mail order business that shipped a lot of stuff daily. When Internet sales took off through the late 90's, a drastic increase in shipping damages came along with it. By '99, our damaged domestic shipments were running close to 3%. Shipping to Canada was always much worse, more like 9% and increased to over 15% in '01 when we were forced to stop shipping to Canada. Of course, this was with product professionally packaged as well as economically feasible.

The really bad part of all this is that all 3 of the major shipping services continue to be worse than ever today.

 

Good luck with the insurance part. With USPS sometimes you can have a h***el collecting when the object being shipped leaves the USA. My son works for a 3rd party mailing group and has told me when you use Fedex or UPS their insurance options cover outside of the USA damages. But with USPS they are a USA agency and a lot of time will not cover danages that MAY HAVE happened outside of the USA. Good Luck, and YES, it ****S big time.

 

I get stuff shipped into my biz in freight trucks sometimes.One day,while helping the driver unload my stuff,I saw a bunch of cardboard boxes broken down ..I mean a lot of boxes,banded together.I asked who they were for,he said UPS.I laughed and asked why UPS would be getting truck freight shipments of boxes? He said he delivered this much to them all the time,for repackaging the stuff they destroyed,and every time he was waiting to get unloaded at their terminal,he could hear **** crashing off of their conveyors all the time.
I've got a buddy who works at UPS,now a driver,used to work in the terminal.They don't have time to give a ****,or stop when they **** up something.Time is money,and our **** doesn't matter.
When you get fragile stuff in,and the boxes have footprints on them.don't be surprised.

 

I can top it....... years ago the ****ers busted an aluminum wheel. YEAH! How in the hell do you do that, other than intentional? I hate UPS.
"What can brown do for you?" How 'bout break all my ****?

 

I worked in the Post Office right out of the Navy for a few years, and around the trucking industry for twenty after that, and I can tell you this guy's got it right. It was probably one of the last things to go in the trailer and instead of grabbing it by hand and turning it sideways, they just "pushed" it in with the tip of a lift truck fork blade. If it didn't "fit" in the first time, it was probably back up and ram mode.

Bottom line is none of these parcel transportation companies (the P O included) give a damn about anything but the bottom line, not their employees, and certainly not your parcels.

 

You don't have to build a tomb, but you do need to pack it like it's worth something. Sure it's only a $50 grill, but how many does he have? That is what makes it worth the trouble. A better package would at least give the illusion of something valuable inside and may have spooked them into handling it a little better. Also, insurance at twice the value is cheap. That way when this happens, you will be certain to recoup cost. Even when UPS says they were wrong, they may only pay a percentage of the value insured. I've dealt with them at my former job. I speak from experience when it comes to these smucks.

It's unfortunate, but the shipping company just might win this one. Updates on how this ends will be interesting.

 

Fragile is not a word in the UPS vocabulary. That was your first mistake.

Plus, UPS is an acronym for yoU Piece of Shit. That's why the trucks are brown. Don't ship with UPS in the future and save yourself the hart ache.