Dear FedEx,

The bulk of the musical talk
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Ken Crawford
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by Ken Crawford »

bloke wrote:being thrown considerably distances
Sometimes I feel like this is something that can happen while practicing, not just in shipping.
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WakinAZ
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Dog indeed

Post by WakinAZ »

I recently shipped via Greyhound a Conn 20 J body and bell in their cases bubble and shrink-wrapped to death, clearly labeled in many places with the address and to handle carefully.

That was about a month ago. The Bell arrived , the body is now lost. Greyhound says it has a tracking system but it is usually not scanned anywhere between the sending point and the final destination. So no matter how many times you visit their website or call their employees at the 800 number, they really have no clue where it is.
This is probably about the 15th or 20th time I've used GPX, but it will probably be the last. The savings I've enjoyed over the years have all been lost on this one transaction as I will eat most of the loss.
I will do a full write-up once the final results are known. In the meantime if anyone has a contact at GPX who has a pulse, let me know please.

Eric "beyond pissed" L.

P.S. I have received tubas from all the major carriers, never any damage. I guess my number was up.

Dillon's uses FedEx Ground, I'll probably give them a shot on my next venture as a long distance seller
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Re: Dog indeed

Post by Michael Bush »

WakinAZ wrote:I recently shipped via Greyhound a Conn 20 J body and bell in their cases bubble and shrink-wrapped to death, clearly labeled in many places with the address and to handle carefully.

That was about a month ago. The Bell arrived , the body is now lost.
I've had that happen twice. One of them was an extremely expensive ($xx,xxx) tuba, so I was freaked out to say the least. (Yes, in retrospect I should have driven to get it myself.) But each time the tuba ended up in Houston where lost packages go. There are human beings there. Both tubas came to me once I got a human being in Houston on the telephone.
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WakinAZ
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by WakinAZ »

Thanks Michael. Is there an official Dead Letter Office there, or is it just whoever picks up the phone?

Thankfully, the maximum loss here is about a grand, but still that's real money to a guy like me.
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by WakinAZ »

PS, I will probably invest in a cell signal luggage tracking tag for my next GPX venture, if there is one.

"Yeah, I know you don't know where it is, but the cell towers tell me it's at the Bumblefudge station..."
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by Michael Bush »

WakinAZ wrote:Thanks Michael. Is there an official Dead Letter Office there, or is it just whoever picks up the phone?

Thankfully, the maximum loss here is about a grand, but still that's real money to a guy like me.
Sending you a PM.
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by olaness1 »

I'm looking into shipping a tuba, and FedEx was no less than 8 times the price of the cheapest competitor. With the track record that people seem to ascribe to them here, how do they still get business shipping tubas??
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Ken Crawford
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by Ken Crawford »

olaness1 wrote:I'm looking into shipping a tuba, and FedEx was no less than 8 times the price of the cheapest competitor. With the track record that people seem to ascribe to them here, how do they still get business shipping tubas??
Shipping tubas is a gamble. FedEx and UPS might destroy your tuba. Greyhound might lose your tuba. Pick your risk.
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Ken Crawford
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by Ken Crawford »

Got the tuba today. Only minor bell damage and a snapped off thumb ring. Not bad considering it was shipped just in the hard case...
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Re:

Post by MaryAnn »

bloke wrote:There are more dynamics that most people realize when it comes to damage prevention.

The goal is NOT to hold the instrument absolutely rigidly inside a sarcophagus.

Rather, the ~best~ goal to which to aspire is - if the instrument's covering travels at a high rate of speed - to have the instrument's speed slow down LESS SUDDENLY (thus: reducing the likelihood of damage) than the covering (i.e. "case"/"shipping carton") slows down.
"
Yup. MIT has this contest in the engineering department, or used to, where the students have to make a package to put a raw egg into and drop it from the top of a two story building without breaking it. The ONLY way to do that is to have the egg's speed diminish at such a rate that the shell does not crack. They come up with all kinds of ways to do that....treat your tuba like an egg. I bet the Mars landers etc operate on the same principle....they don't crash into the planet stuffed tight into a hard shell. They decelerate at a rate that has been calculated to not break anything.
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by Ken Crawford »

Nooo....I'm not good with that at all. Hopefully FedEx will reimburse for repairs. Of course there is some intrinsic value of the horn lost now that it will have some repaired areas. I don't know what else to do.
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by Ken Crawford »

Well, the seller did tell me that he was going to be boxing up the tuba inside the hard case. When I saw the FedEx guy was handing me a tuba case with FexEx tags on it I was instantly angry and concerned. There would not have been damage if it had been in a box with some minimal packing effort.
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by WakinAZ »

Just to close the loop on my piece of this thread:
The other half of the 20J I shipped a month ago finally showed up in MA. Laughably, the GPX website still does not show any status other than when I dropped it off here in Arizona: no in between check-ins and no final delivery.

Their tracking system is an absolute joke. Even the employees I spoke to on the phone admitted that the stations beyond the initial station don't scan the items, and no one forces them to do so.

Unlike the good service you get at most of the local stations, the national infrastructure and staff seems to have a culture of mediocrity and complacency.
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by groth »

WakinAZ wrote:Just to close the loop on my piece of this thread:
The other half of the 20J I shipped a month ago finally showed up in MA. Laughably, the GPX website still does not show any status other than when I dropped it off here in Arizona: no in between check-ins and no final delivery.

Their tracking system is an absolute joke. Even the employees I spoke to on the phone admitted that the stations beyond the initial station don't scan the items, and no one forces them to do so.

Unlike the good service you get at most of the local stations, the national infrastructure and staff seems to have a culture of mediocrity and complacency.
Was my experience as well, glad it finally arrived. I've heard of a couple instances where they never showed up at all (you can even google search the tubenet results). So now you can stop sweating bullets. :o
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Re: Dear FedEx,

Post by groth »

kmorgancraw wrote:Well, the seller did tell me that he was going to be boxing up the tuba inside the hard case. When I saw the FedEx guy was handing me a tuba case with FexEx tags on it I was instantly angry and concerned. There would not have been damage if it had been in a box with some minimal packing effort.
Yea there is only so much you can tell your seller, he's going to get it out quickly as possible once he has your money. I had a claim once where a bell had a small bend in it. Took pics, sent in the claim online, talked to a rep over the phone and in 7 days it was paid.
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