Fetch Is at It Again

We regret to inform you of this, but Fetch is at it again. The package delivery complicator, long a bane of this website, has yet again made it more difficult to receive our packages. Short context, before we explain:

• Our apartment building uses Fetch as its “package delivery” service.
• Our apartment building won’t let other delivery people in to drop packages at our doors, so there’s no way to opt out.
• We have to input a special, complicated address to get our packages delivered through Fetch, and some online retailers can’t process it, meaning we can’t shop at those online retailers (we’re still trying to get my mom’s Christmas gift, which we ordered on Black Friday).
• If a friend tries to send us a package and doesn’t know about the special, complicated address, that package is in limbo.
• Even when packages are successfully delivered to Fetch, they arrive a few hours later or a day later than they otherwise would have. (Fetch is adamant this isn’t the case, but Fetch is adamant about a lot of things that aren’t true.)
• Even when packages are successfully delivered to Fetch, they sometimes disappear. There is a wormhole in the Fetch warehouse. That, or it’s easy to steal from a disorganized startup.
• We pay the apartment building who then pays Fetch for all these privileges.

There’s been an ice storm in Texas this week, so roads have been dangerous. We get this, this is fine, if UPS or FedEx or the Postal Service can’t deliver our packages, we really understand. Nobody’s safety is worth our package delivery.

What we do mind is that UPS and FedEx and the Postal Service have been delivering our packages.

To Fetch.

And Fetch won’t deliver them to us.

They don’t make it this simple, of course. They don’t send out a notice saying, “Hey, no deliveries until Friday.” Instead, what they did with one specific package of ours—one with clothes we needed for a wedding this weekend—was tell us they’d deliver it as normal, then send us a cancelation notification, then let us reschedule, then send us a cancelation notification, then let us reschedule again, then send us a cancelation notification after they were already halfway through the delivery window. Yesterday, they said they’d deliver it between 12:00 and 2:00. Yesterday, we were notified at 1:19 that it wasn’t coming. Yesterday, we found out at 1:21 that their warehouse was closing at 3:00. They didn’t tell us that. We just noticed it in the fine print when we said, “Screw it, we’ll just make the 40-minute trek to the warehouse,” and clicked the ‘pickup from warehouse’ option.

Again: If not for Fetch, the package would have been delivered. It would have been delivered on Monday. Instead, we had to go pick it up ourselves, and we had to pick it up on Wednesday. This was partially Fetch’s poor planning, and it was made worse by Fetch’s poor execution, but their failure to deliver the package we pay them to deliver wasn’t the real problem. I wouldn’t want to send my drivers out on the ice either if I were Fetch. The problem was that by existing, Fetch set us up for this exact scenario.

That’s the thing about Fetch. Even if they operated smoothly, even if their communication was precise, even if they did what they do for free…Fetch would be a net negative, because Fetch slows packages down. There is no benefit to residents from Fetch existing. There is only inconvenience.