Stu: Josh’s buddy used to do class action lawsuits.
Stu’s wife: Uh-uh. Nope.
A few months ago, we wrote to you about Fetch, the basic concept of which is that Hell has come to Earth and it’s started its own business. At the time, I was freshly enraged, and I vowed internally to take down Fetch. Then, well, nothing that bad happened for a few months. Small pains, here and there, but no cataclysms. Until Saturday. Saturday, there was a cataclysm.
One of the many things Fetch does that pisses me the hell off is refuse to leave oversized packages in the hallway. On the surface, this makes sense: You don’t want the hallway blockaded by packages, especially in the event someone falls asleep with pizza rolls in the toaster oven. In practice, what this means is that if someone at Fetch’s warehouse enters the dimension of your package incorrectly, it can be labeled as a “large package,” so even though the neighbors across the hall have a [expletives] desk in a box leaning against their door, you have to be present to receive your dog’s prescription food delivery from Chewy.
Fetch, of course, doesn’t make this easy to do. The delivery windows you can select are four hours in length, and on weekends, there’s only one of them per day: 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Since the alternative is an hour-and-a-half round trip to Fetch’s warehouse, which has gotten better since February (spoiler: I go to the warehouse later in this story) but still sucks (spoiler: I have a bad experience at the warehouse later in this story), you’re strongly incentivized to try your luck with the delivery window. It’s a gamble to trust Fetch to bring a package during the four hours they say they’re going to bring said package, but compared to a guaranteed hour-and-a-half trip to the lair of your mortal enemy…I gambled. And I lost. At 6:44 PM on Friday, I selected the 2-6 window on Saturday. At 5:39 PM on Saturday, after I’d spent three hours and thirty-nine minutes twiddling my thumbs waiting for the package, Fetch texted and emailed me to say the delivery window was “no longer available,” which was a funny way for them to say they weren’t gonna do the thing my building pays them to do.
I was, of course, apoplectic. It wasn’t enough to reply to the “window unavailable” email using every trick I know to evade the cuss-word filter. I had to email our leasing office and ask if we could switch to a system where UPS just threw our packages in the swimming pool. I also had to google the founder/CEO, fail to find his email address, guess what his email address might be, then send an email to that email address telling him his scam is making my life worse. (I guessed wrong about the email address—as was fitting, there was a “delivery error.”) Then, I had to drive to the warehouse yesterday, ring the bell they say to ring, wait ten minutes for the employee in the bathroom to finish taking his dump, reply, “No,” when he came out and asked if I’d been helped, and wait another ten minutes while he went back into the warehouse to find someone who could help me, which turned out to be a guy who just dragged the first guy back and taught him how to retrieve my package.
I’m pretty sure, based on way too much research, that my apartment building’s corporate owner has an agreement with Fetch which applies to most if not all of their properties. I don’t know the specifics of this agreement, but as I wrote in February, I really hope kickbacks are involved. The apartment building charges us to use Fetch, refuses to allow us to receive deliveries any other way, and lied when they initially described Fetch to us, neglecting to mention that it slows down delivery and may cause you to lose your security deposit after you repeatedly smash your head against the walls in frustration. I’m guessing this isn’t grounds for a class action lawsuit, but I also kind of wonder if it is, or if it’s at least grounds enough for me to be a real pain in Fetch’s ass to repay the hardship they’ve inflicted on my own ass. If you know, please let me know. Fetch needs to be stopped. (Also if you work for Amazon I think Fetch might be indirectly stealing money from you by losing packages and taking advantage of your willingness to refund customers. Because I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to me with the first package I tried receiving from Fetch, back in February, though I doubt it can be proven.)
My biggest issue with Fetch isn’t Fetch itself, its that UPS thinks it doesnt have to deliver to me if I decide not to use Fetch. Carriers that refuse to delivery could end up in a class action as well considering that theyre not fulfilling the service you paid for and entered an agreement with your landlord and Fetch that is keeping you from having that service fulfilled in lieu of a fee. So not only could landlords be getting a kickback from Fetch, it could be other carriers as well.