I have to stick up for UPS on this one. I have had nothing but great results with them.
ABS

My favorite UPS experience? ...the truck drives past our apartment, doesn't stop, and then the UPS tracking shows "nobody home".

okay...finally, the package arrives 3 days later, 3 days late. The truck stops. A guitar box comes tumbling hard out of the driver's door onto the street. The UPS guy arrives at the door, farts, and hands me a damaged box. I noted that the box was damaged. I open the box, the 5-way switch is bent bad where the box hit the ground.

On another occasion, clear skies across the US -- "weather exception", a week late.

Brown let me down!

However, after making the appropriate complaints...I got a crack UPS squad coming to my house -- on time, friendly, no farts!

It's been found. In his other thread, http://www.fender.com/community/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=64607 mAx___ said that UPS had found it. They had returned it to the seller.

99 times out of a hundred that's because the sender re-used a box that had been shipped to him, and he left one of the original "ship to" labels on it (with his address instead of the buyer's address). Boxes like that can reverse directions several times and bounce back and forth across the country -- a sorter at the first hub sees the right zip code and puts it on a truck going west, and then at the next hub a sorter sees the wrong zip code and puts it on a truck going east. They don't scan every step and every transfer from truck to truck. The boxes from the semi trucks get tossed on a conveyor belt to a sorting area. A group of people pluck the boxes from the conveyor, glance at them for a zip code, then move them onto different conveyors running to outbound trucks going to other hubs. It's Christmas shipping time -- the busiest part of the year. The sorters don't double-check to make sure all the addresses on a box match, they go by the first one they see.

I always do my part for "green" and recycle boxes whenever possible. But the first thing I do before packing them is strip off any previous labels that could be ambiguously interpreted as a delivery (or return) address. Leftover ink-stamped bar codes and such are always obscured via the liberal application of a black marker -- I leave no vestiges of the carton's prior use that might cause delivery problems.

Arjay

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"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

Thankyou Arjay.

and thankyou boxbang as well.

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.