Can you create a ”My UPS” account on the UPS website and leave an instruction that all packages are to be delivered to the front porch?

I had a similar issue with FedX delivering cat litter from Chewy. They left it in the open near the front porch. Ten more steps and they could have placed it under cover. Do these carriers have an issue with Chewy?

And my mother’s hearing aids which were mistakenly resent to her rather than returned back to the seller, sat on her porch for like a week because they were left there where no one would see them rather than by the garage where we would have. And the porch is like 13 stairs up, so not lazy.

They can't make everyone happy. Best bet is to sign up for alerts with the major carriers so that you know when something has been delivered. Then you know to retrieve it and not tempt the porch pirates.

This isn't about porch pirates. It's about piss poor service.

Seconding Lindsey's advice - if you haven't signed up for your own accounts at FedEx and UPS, it is very worth it. I too rarely use my front door, so have posted instructions to leave all packages on a bench next to my garage doors. Most of the time both providers actually do as instructed.

You can also schedule holds for when you're going out of town, schedule deliveries for a different day, etc..

Porch pirates was an aside. Many people, especially those who drive, use their garage as their main entrance and may rarely make it to the front door themselves. I don’t happen to be one of them, but if I were then things could be overlooked on the front stoop.

First world problems.

I have the same problem with FedEx. They leave every Chewy box in front of my garage door. So aggravating.

The driver is responsible for looking behind the car before backing up. It takes but a few seconds to walk past the car door to look for obstacles behind before getting in. What if a dog or cat had been there sleeping? Or a bike or other toy had been left there?

Judi, there's hardly room under that small overhang to put those three big boxes without blocking passage. 3 heavy boxes x 10 steps x 2 trips for each (back and forth) and then getting a complaint for blocking the door? Easy to understand why.

Is it possible that many people keep bags of dog food in the garage? If that is so, then it would be logical for the carrier to deliver to the garage door.

It's my understanding people order cat litter because it's sooo heavy. Anyone check with these delivery services to find out what their policy is? DH filled out a formn about where to deliver our packages--access door of garage so it isn't on the front porch or visible from the street. It was not an issue.

Judi, there's hardly room under that small overhang to put those three big boxes without blocking passage. 3 heavy boxes x 10 steps x 2 trips for each (back and forth) and then getting a complaint for blocking the door? Easy to understand why.

The porch you see is 15 feet long and 6 feet wide. That's plenty of room. Previous Chewy litter deliveries were left next to the steps. In fact, all deliveries from all carriers are always left on that porch. Have been for the past 40 years. 🙄

Hmm, sorry, the photo must be showing compressed depth of field. From the photo, the seat looks like it's right next to the brick stair on one side and just a foot or two closer to the door from the trellis on the other.

You were getting kitty litter deliveries 20-40 years ago?

Why the need to be such a smart ass? Do you want a list of every delivery I've received through the years?

Yes, Lindsay, that's what Chewie suggested I do.

Judi, that's rediculous. Yes, just leave them out in the rain when you could have walked five more feet.

Foodonastump, no issue with porch pirates in my neighborhood.

Elmer, no reason for anything to be behind my garage door and I only open my garage door after I get in my vehicle. I live alone, no bikes or other things and hopefully an animal would run off when they hear the door open, it's pretty loud.

Will sign up with UPS, even though I doubt it will help any.

Edited: I just checked and I already have an account with them, only my username/password doesn't work and they said they sent an email with my user name but still waiting for it.

UPS deliveries are working well for me. FedEx is hit or miss. We have 5 acre lots in our neighborhood, so some of the driveways are pretty long. Last Summer, a FedEx delivery guy piled up packages at my curb. About 15 of them. One was mine, but the rest was for people all over our subdivision. It was a Saturday afternoon, so maybe he wanted to get on with his weekend. My husband and I loaded up the car and took them to the correct addresses. I never got an answer to my complained email. A few weeks ago, they put an envelope into a trash bag and tied it to my mailbox post. It contained my husband's passport….Good thing they at times provide proof of delivery pictures. The “delivered at gate” isn’t helpful. I don’t have one :)

There’s no precipitation visible in Judi’s picture. The leaf covered path though may have given the impression it wasn’t a well traveled entrance. All I’m suggesting is that with this sort of thing, one person’s preference might be another person’s annoyance. And my impression is that these drivers are under a lot of pressure to blast though their routes, I’d tend to cut them a little slack.

" no reason for anything to be behind my garage door "

Do animals know that? Do children who may leave toys or who knows what else know that?

I don't think so.

When in a public parking lot, do you look behind your car before getting in to back up? I'm going to guess the answer is similarly No. It's a good practice.

Elmer, there is no reason a child should be leaving their toys in my driveway, ever. I have no kids who live in my home so why would I expect them to be there? No neighborhood kids have ever left their toys/bikes in my driveway and I've lived here since 2006. Of course I look behind my car in a public parking spot. You remind me of my brother, which isn't a good thing.

Kathsgrdn, we feed 6 indoor cats and more than a dozen outdoors. Chewy loves us. And we love them. On the days of delivery, DH leaves his dolly near the garage door and most FedEx drivers get it right. Just one, a gal, will put them on our front porch. We are unable to bring them in through the front door and have to resort to dragging a couple hundred pounds of cat food around to the garage. One day I witnessed her placement and asked, “Could you please put the boxes on the dolly?” She backed toward her truck, flipped me off with both hands and said, “I did my job”. I reported her behavior, but I doubt anything will change. I also called Chewy to ask if there is something they could add to their delivery instructions to help us out. Ellen said she could. She fixed our labels so that under our name the second line reads “Deliver to garage door”. She said we could have done that ourselves if we had known. And guess what? Chewy deliveries are now always put near the garage door, even when the unhappy gal is bringing them.

Check your labels on Chewy’s site and edit your labels.

We all make our own choices. For me, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Funny you don't see it that way after an experience suggesting your approach has its risks.

Both Chewy and Amazon are excellent at notifying when your package will be arriving and when its actually been delivered. If I'm expecting deliveries I always check for them before leaving the house. If they haven't arrived yet, I check immediately upon my return. Easy. The only complaint I ever had was when some Amazon deliveries would be left under the doormat. It's didn't really "hide" anything, quite the opposite actually and I didn't want to deal with the dirt. So I did request Amazon stop doing that and haven't had any more issues.

I love our UPS guy, Bud. And I like our USPS mail guy now, Frankie, who replaced that terrible shrew that everyone viscerally hated. They always deliver things right to our kitchen steps. And they are nice. Fed Ex is hit or miss for us. They always have different drivers on our route. They often deliver my stuff to my neighbors house. And one of their drivers in particular, perhaps frustrated by their workload, chucked 3 boxes, which contained 9 dozen candle jars, into our carport and shattered all of them. Never saw him again. They also often do not deliver the full order. More often than not, they will leave a box of candle jars or something on the truck and have to deliver it the next day. Fed Ex has it rough. Everything that is excessively heavy seems to be sent by FedEx. If I or my SO is home when they arrive we ALWAYS go help, as it is always something heavy, like the candle jars or the 60 lb blocks of wax I buy, or the new bookcase I just ordered. Tires we order always come by FedEx. They have a heavy workload. I have several truck drivers that used to work for Fed Ex and hating Chewy in particular, according to them, is in fact a sort of running joke. They have people who not only order several 50 pound bags of dog food or kitty litter or whatever, then they make demands on how to deliver them. A few of them have remarked that the customers were their main reason for leaving, because of their odd demands. Listening to them, I can understand. If you are unwilling to haul heavy items 5 extra feet for your own pets, why do you demand they do it? One of them, I remember, remarked that he thought one lady in particular, who was VERY specific on where she wanted her kitty litter delivered, complained every single delivery and was an overall whiner. He said he expected her to one day demand that he start changing her kitty litter and feeding her cats as part of his job. Of course he was being sarcastic but I understand the frustration.

I have only had something delivered by Amazon once. I was not even aware that Amazon had delivery drivers out in the sticks where we live. But it was a fairly large item. An "apartment size" fridge that I bought SO to put in his shop for Valentines Day. It is 90 pounds. I expected it to come by Fed Ex, but was surprised to see the Amazon truck on the Blink cameras. They left it at the very edge of the carport, and it poured rain later that day before I could get to it. It was okay though. I could not really expect them to bring it all the way into the carport. They delivered it, undamaged and on time sooooo.

I do think that delivering something to a closed garage door is weird. Other than something very large or heavy, one would not expect to look there for a delivery. Its a shame that UPS and fed ex cannot put small items like that into the mailbox, where it would be easily found and safe from such a fate. But their job is to deliver. That is it. They have a LOT of deliveries daily most likely do not have the time to be particular for everyone.

Well said, Amy.

I see that Chewy box and think of all of the Chewy boxes the delivery person had/ has to deal with that day, that week, that month...... And think: "Remember when? When we had to drive to the store, hike the parking lot, go inside, walk nearly a block to get to the pet food aisles, wrestle a 40# sack into the cart, push it through the store, stop to pay for it and then out to the car, heave it into the trunk, drive home, dig that 40# sack out of car and lug it into the house?

If hauling the pet stuff a few feet is too much, maybe it's time to rethink having pets.

My box was a very small one with just Frontline inside it. Not big and bulky or heavy, so walking the 6 feet or so to the porch wasn't going to put a strain on this person at all and if it was, they need a different job. lol.

UPS does ok for me. fedex, on the other hand, i fight with them for pretty much every delivery. they deliver my package, tracking indicates "delivered" but what they fail at every single time is delivering it to ME. my deliveries usually end up at one of the other houses on the farm (there are 4 families living on 20 acres) which means i have to go hunt them down. they have also delivered packages that ended up 5 or 6 or 7 miles down the road. it's beyond frustrating.

Yes, your package was tiny. But how many hundreds of pounds of Chewy had been loaded into the delivery truck that day? Which is what I was talking about--cat litter & 40# bags of dog food. I know that my son gets 120# of Chewy delivered at one time--have no idea how many similar orders there could be on that truck that day.

I have had packages left in front of my garage door, too. I'm usually much more likely to see them sooner there than if the pkg. was left on my front porch. And I never know what could be out there--a garden tool that a neighbor has returned, something my husband parked out there, something I left out there & forgot about, something next to the door that the wind toppled in front of. Or, back in the day, kid stuff.

Bottom line is that you drove over your package on your driveway, got a reminder of basics rules of operating heavy machinery and suffered no harm in the process. Fortunately.

There’s no precipitation visible in Judi’s picture.

I think she meant if it rained they would be fully exposed sitting there in the driveway. As for the leaves, it was March when the live oak drops its leaves. It's an ongoing thing for about a month.

Still waiting on an email from UPS regarding my username/password. I requested it a second time last night and still nothing from them. Why am I not surprised.

dees, it's nice to balance out comments with words from the drivers' side of the delivery game. It's a hard job and one for which I suspect there are more complaints than compliments. But I've heard that at least for UPS drivers, the pay is pretty good for what it is and for what the minimum expected prereqs are.

I also offer water and snacks

SO awesome!

We typically have good service from most delivery people. This particular Chewy delivery was via FedX, but by a person not driving a FedX vehicle.

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I also offer water and snacks

A neighbor a few houses down always kept a basket of treats and an ice chest with bottled water for drivers. He worked from home and had almost daily deliveries.

My sister puts out a cooler and snacks when she’s expecting deliveries. I don't think she has many takers but hopefully they at least appreciate the gesture.

Here's my gripe of the day. Can't blame Fedex, and I must say as much as we order (constant!) product mixups are rare. The label correctly indicates what I ordered.

Oh well, I did get a free pan out of it.

I have a Fat Daddio's springform pan. Just used it the other day to make Ina's Blueberry Ricotta Breakfast cake.

dees, we do keep a dolly outside, accessible and in plain sight for them if they want it. Most delivery drivers have their own anyway. Only one has used it. A lady, named Kelly, who drove for fedex. Me and SO were home that day and rushed out to help her. It was a large and heavy order of candle and soap supplies. She told us that one of the tires on her dolly was flat, rendering it useless, and SO used his air compressor to fill up the tire, and told her she was free to use it as needed if she were to make other deliveries to us. The Amazon people had their own when delivering the fridge.