UCAN community member ktmitchell writes the following: "In our modern global economy, the old cliché “time is money” has become an understatement. For the small business owners, when goods are lost, money is lost. Wages that could have been earned using those goods disappear as well. Consumers rely on shipping companies to complete business transactions by moving goods as quickly as the deals were made. Just as customers are confident that their shipments will arrive on time, they believe their packages will arrive undamaged.

When it comes to FedEx Ground Shipping, that confidence could be misplaced faith. I learned that the hard way when I shipped my turntables from my apartment in New York City to my mother’s home in California in the spring of 2007. Although I packed the turntables in a padlocked professional, padded case, the package arrived opened and damaged with expensive equipment missing.

FedEx admitted the turntables were damaged under their care, but refused to pay the total amount of replacement costs. On more than one occasion they cited their user agreement as reason to deny my claim. FedEx’s user agreement includes a clause that allows FedEx to change their policy at any time without notice, which they did and repeatedly.

After running into brick walls when dealing with FedEx, I decided to do some digging to see if other people were having similar problems. What I uncovered was shocking.

On numerous consumer watchdog complaint websites, average Americans continuously vent their ire against what they claim to be FedEx’s decline in quality services. On consumeraffairs.org, the complaint list is so extensive; it is subdivided by the type of complaint. In the simplest scenarios, packages were not delivered on time or they were delivered to the wrong address, typically to a neighbor. The worst, and most frequent, situations were when people like me had shipped properly packaged items, only to have them irreparably destroyed.

In most instances FedEx refused to compensate these customers, or give them a refund of their shipping cost. This was true even if customers paid the full price of insurance before shipping their item. If settlements were offered, it only covered a fraction of the monetary damage. Again, people stated Fed Ex cited their user policy as the reason to refuse most claims. Small claims courts uphold FedEx’s refusal of liability.

Also on the Consumer Affairs site were comments posted by employees at www.consumeraffairs.org. Apparently, FedEx employees are just as angry with the company as customers are.

FedEx delivery drivers are independent contractors, not full employees. This means the majority of have no insurance, no sick days, no overtime pay, no vacations and no motivation to handle packages carefully, or even deliver them to the right address. Independent contractor status makes employees difficult to track if packages “go missing.” On the Consumer Affairs site, Jack of Texas claims "the prevalence of damaged packages is due to FedEx using conveyer belts to load packages directly onto trucks". Imagine your well padded but delicate Christmas gift sliding down that belt into an unpadded truck— and some professor's 50 pound shipment of books tumbling behind it. Jack goes on to say that "the package handlers are only part time workers who perform “8-hour job in a 4-5 hour span,” receive no benefits, and don’t care if they throw packages".

If what Jack reports is true, FedEx’s very infrastructure must change in order to prevent serious damage to packages. For instance, packages could be marked fragile, then separated from heavier items. There was a time when the shipping companies did that, remember? That was back in the when companies weren’t afraid to pay employees a living wage with benefits, back when people kept one job until they retired and companies were integral with communities and back when companies took pride in their integrity; not their profit margin.

Even more frightening, the US postal service has agreed to pay 6.3 billion to have access to FedEx’s air network. The Association for Postal Commerce claims since this deal was finalized in 2001, the time it takes to deliver Priority Mail has increased from 2.15 to 2.69 days.

Furthermore, the alliance between FedEx and the US Postal Service was a sweetheart deal. There was no bidding process to allow other shipping contractors to compete for this contract. It is not surprising FedEx procured this deal with minimal effort when considering the corporation’s contributions to a long list of elected officials that includes John Mc Cain of Arizona, Charles Rangel of New York and Stephen Ira Cohen of Tennessee. www.opensecrets.com claims FedEx offers the use of private jets to politicians when trying to curry favor.

Ultimately, sweet deals for politicians leave a sour taste in their constituents’ mouths. When Federal law bows to corporate contracts, the government has ceased to work for its citizens. Vendors on sites like EBay and Amazon stand to lose a substantial portion of their business if they cannot rely on Fed Ex to protect their packages during shipping. Not only can self-employed people lose money if they lose their items, they lose time chasing down compensation and wages from soured business deals. Now that FedEx has part of it’s operations under the jurisdiction of the Postal Service, it is up to the Postmaster and Inspector General to oversee this corporation’s day-to-day operations in order to insure quality service."