One more story from the bakery:
The one year we decide to switch from UPS to DHL for express shipping this happens. We dread the feared "last call of the day" because, even if the bosses had called quitting time, if you were on a call, customers came first. Which is reasonable, from a business standpoint. But still, no one likes to get the last call. Sure enough it was my unlucky day, one time. But it was not a customer, it was the DHL delivery driver.
One of our customers had ordered a cheesecake. Because cheesecakes are highly perishable, we pack them in dry ice and express ship them at our (the bakery's) expense and at no charge to the customer. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning orders will be immediately rush-shipped out to be received by the customer on either Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday of the same week. Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, and Friday orders will be processed that Monday, and shipped out that Monday afternoon, to be received later that same week.
Well this woman delivery driver wants us to find this address (is DHL too cheap to spring for GPS? Just sayin'...) for her. Well it's supposed to go to a small country town whose name I won't mention, about 100+ miles southeast of metro Los Angeles. Well, after - I kid you not - 30 minutes of trying to find this customer's address - it's literally out on a county road out in the middle of the bareback desert - we finally find the customers address.
The DHL driver asks how far is it, because she's at a convenience store in West Hollywood asking for directions. After I go through a detailed explanation of how to get there, she realizes that it's too far for her to drive because it's late-afternoon/early evening on a Friday night. So this dame literally tells me that the cheesecake is going to sit in the local DHL warehouse all weekend, and they'll deliver it first thing Monday, and promptly hangs up. The cheesecake will be ruined by Monday morning.
So we pull the customer's order, refund it, and put in an order to whip up a fresh cheesecake Monday morning and overnight it via UPS. We happily stuck DHL with the bill for the whole fiasco. They had to pay back the money we refunded the customer, they had owed us a penalty because the customer's order didn't get to them on time, and we also sent them the bill that UPS sent us for the overnight shipping. Inside that cheesecake package we also sent an apology letter to the customer explaining what happened and who dropped the ball, and we also tagged along a $25 gift certificate. DHL paid for all that, too.
As you can imagine, after so many cases like this, where DHL kept dropping the ball time and again, we switched back to UPS, the following Christmas season.
](/images/smilies/bang.gif "Brick wall ](*,)")
