I’ve been complaining about UPS a lot recently, and I think I’m justified in that because they haven’t been bothering to deliver packages. And when I go there to deal with the problem, they show every indication of not caring. Not only do they not deliver the packages, they don’t care that they don’t deliver the packages. That’s my problem, their attitude shouts.

A couple days ago, we had another snowstorm, significant enough that I can only get the Suburban up the driveway in a kind of controlled slide. It’s like driving a 6000 lb. snowmobile.

About an hour ago, our doorbell rang. There was the FedEx guy, with a two-day FedEx letter, i.e. about the cheapest service FedEx sells.

He had parked his truck at the bottom of the driveway and walked up here to deliver it.

Our driveway is about 700 feet long. I shot this picture as he was walking back to his truck, when he was about halfway there:

Click on the picture for a larger version.

On Friday, we came home to find some computers I’d ordered stacked outside the basement door:

It turns out the same guy had carried these things — they’re about 50 pounds each — halfway up the driveway, because that’s all the farther his truck could get.

When I have a choice of shippers, I don’t bother with UPS. Unfortunately, the choice is rarely left up to the customer — except in that the customer has a choice to buy things from companies that don’t use UPS.

Warren Brown writes the car column for the Washington Post; I’ve written about him before, when, on vacation in Alaska, he wrote that the fine inhabitants of that state were more virtuous than Washingtonians, because they didn’t drive SUVs or fancy cars at the same rate. This is not just wrong but almost prefectly wrong; Alaska has more cars, and more roads, per capita than any other state, and its SUV-to-licensed-driver ratio is the third highest in the nation, after Colorado and Wyoming.

Today’s column is nominally about the 2007 GMC Sierra 1500: that is, a pickup truck, but most of the copy is actually about what Warren Brown supposes are the thoughts and feelings of people in rural America.

I have a theory about big pickup trucks and why there are so many of them in places such as Luray and the swamp and bayou towns of my home state, Louisiana. Trucks are practical. They carry and pull lots of stuff, much of it heavy and unglamorous. Terrain and weather in those regions often are challenging. Two-wheel-drive wimpmobiles don’t measure up to conditions. And most of the people in those areas are workers, people who turn wrenches, plant fields, lift bales and use hammers and saws as part of their daily regimen. They need vehicles that work as hard as they do.

My experience bears this out. In the boonies, more people are effectively Independent Contractors, distances are relatively large, and profit margins are slim. This means that a lot of people have personal cause to move large amounts of relatively low-value stuff around.

So people drive pickup trucks, which are cheap and useful: they’re also generally the cheapest vehicles you can get with four-wheel drive, which comes in handy for a lot of the same people. Figuring this out is not rocket science. Brown has another idea, though:

But, in a way, those rural truck drivers and owners are as much victims of automotive illusion as their paper-pushing, word-processing cousins in the city, where sports cars, luxury sedans, and super-bling sport-utility vehicles reign.

Everyone’s a victim. The Washington Post says so. Nobody buys anything because they like it, or because it meets their needs. No: they’re victims of illusion. How bleak it must be for Warren Brown to live in such a world. He lays out, quite elegantly, the precise reasons why people drive pickup trucks, and in the next paragraph he discards that reasoning in favor of believing that what’s really going on is that everyone has been tricked.

Cars and trucks are more than the sums of their parts. They have a meaning far beyond themselves. The city slicker in the high-end sedan is telling the world that he or she has arrived, if only at an elevated place in his or her own mind. The owner of a pickup truck in small-town America is declaring his or her just-folks status — a sort of down-to-earth ruggedness, an awareness that getting close to nature also means getting dirty, dented and scratched, a belief that only trucks are worthy of that bruising communion. That is why there are so many pickup trucks in rural and small-town America.

“The owner of a pickup truck [...] is declaring his or her just-folks status.” Declaring. Because it is entirely beyond the comprehension of Warren Brown (or of most of the Washington Post staff, actually, to judge from the paper) that people are what they are. That, for some people, everything isn’t a pose.

I eventually got my shoes, though it did require three trips to the UPS depot for them to actually find the package.

Yesterday, I ordered another gewgaw from Amazon with next-day shipping.

Amazon shipped it on time from Louisville, KY, about 550 miles from here. It appears that it won’t be delivered until tomorrow:

Note that ‘ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS CAUSED THIS DELAY’; presumably this is the delay from 1:00 a.m. until 5:57 a.m, because 73 minutes to get from Louisville to Dulles isn’t long at all. It would seem — though of course the UPS website doesn’t tell me this — that the package arrived at the depot in Front Royal too late to make it onto the truck this morning.

This would actually not be a problem at all if UPS had any way of dealing with this at all gracefully. I’m going to be driving past UPS in about 30 minutes, and it would take me no time at all to pick the package up there. They could have a satisfied customer without having to even go to the effort of delivering the package.

And even with not being able to pick the thing up, the whole experience would be less grating if it didn’t seem that the average shipment is delayed for, in the all-caps language of their website, ‘REASONS BEYOND UPS’ CONTROL’. When they’re all late, it might be worth considering that the problem is that they don’t actually have the resources or capability to deliver the service that they sell.

Hey — I should start a courier service that promises delivery from New York to Los Angeles in a microsecond. Every package would de delayed for ‘REASONS BEYOND TINO’S CONTROL’, as, hey, I don’t choose to not be able to travel at greater than the speed of light.

UPDATE: So I went down to UPS, and the package wasn’t there. They said that when things came in too late for the trucks, that they’d send the packages out, meet the drivers somewhere, etc., etc., and that the package was now on the truck for delivery.

There is, of course, no mention of this in the tracking information. As we drove up the hill to the house just now, we saw the UPSmobile zipping around the neighborhood. Maybe they’ll show up with it yet — or maybe they’ll refuse to deliver it, as the driveway is still covered with snow and UPS won’t consistently leave things at the bottom of the driveway like FedEx and DHL will.

I was poking around eBay, and I found a sport coat for sale there that used to belong to Walter Cronkite.

It’s my size, but it’s pretty ugly, so I think I’ll pass. But I’d like to get it anyway, just so I could wear it and bore everyone with the story about how it (allegedly) used to belong to Cronkite. And while wearing it, I’d be sure to constantly say ‘That’s the way it is’ in any situation where the phrase could possibly apply.

Q (waiter): Can I get you another round?
A (Tino): That’s the way it is.

Q: Why are you wearing that terrible jacket? Are you blind?
A: That’s the way it is.

Q: You want fries with that?
A: That’s the way it is.

Etc., etc.: you get the idea. And then it occurred to me that I could buy other celebrities’ clothing and adopt their catchphrases while wearing the stuff.

This is an even better idea than the one I had a few weeks ago that involved having dozens of different hats for different activities: each one would be a standard collapsible top hat, but with, e.g. ‘Breakfast’ written on the front in red felt letters. I came up with a whole bunch of them:

• Breakfast
• TV
• Lawn Mowing
• Brushing Teeth
• French Circus

Well, it was funny at the time. I could hardly breathe, I was laughing so hard.

On Sunday night, I ordered some shoes from Zappos. I spent enough that I got free overnight shipping, which would ordinarily have meant that they would get here on Tuesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, we had a snowstorm, and UPS didn’t deliver it:

– though even at 1:49 p.m., when they gave up on it, the roads weren’t very bad.

Today, they didn’t even attempt a delivery:

I can’t say I entirely blame them. The road to the house is fine, but the driveway is so bad that I can’t even get up it with four wheel drive.

This isn’t a big problem, though, really, because the UPS depot is about four miles from here, and I drive past it when I go anywhere. I checked the UPS website and found that I could pick up Air packages until 7:00 p.m.:

And I went down there.

You know the punchline, of course? Right. You can’t pick up Air packages until 7:00: they ‘pick up’ Air packages from there at 7 p.m. From a customer’s perspective, they really mean ‘drop off’, as in ‘you can drop off Air packages until 7 p.m.’

The hours are defined from their perspective, which I suppose I shouldn’t find all that surprising given the rest of the way they relate to their customers.

But the real punchline is that Nicole bought a pair of shoes from a private seller on eBay within minutes of me placing my Zappos order. That package arrived today, from Los Angeles, via Priority Mail. Little Guy: 1, Big Company With UPS Contract: 0

A headline today:

I realize that in some places, this might be surprising: but remember that Virginia has relatively lax gun laws. Robbing a house when there’s nobody there greatly increases the chances that the homeowner is going to blow your head off when he finds you standing in his living room with your swag bag.

And the Arlington cops are on top of things, too:

“We’re just getting downright aggravated,” said Arlington Detective Roger Estes, the lead investigator on the case. “Enough is enough.”

Yesterday, Nicole and I ventured forth from Tino Country into the suburbs, to do some shopping. Purchases: a wireless Mighty Mouse, three pairs of shoes for Tino, $120 worth of wine, a book, and some stuff for Nicole from H&M. The total expenditure was around $1000, because two of the pairs of shoes were expensive, and the third was very expensive.

We would have spent more, had we been able to.

The first place was a Borders store, for the book. The store wasn’t particularly crowded, especially for a Saturday afternoon, but we still had to wait in line behind ten other people to pay. They had four tills in operation, out of about eight, and this would have been sufficient had not Borders been trying to sell every customer on the wisdom of joining the Borders Rewards Card club, which seems to amount to a frequent-flyer program.

In the middle of your transaction, the clerk asks whether you’ve got a Rewards Card. If you say No, they’ll ask whether you want one. If, at that point, you say anything other than No again, there follows about a four-minute sales talk and, possibly, your enrollment in the club. Judging from the website, the card actually appears to be quite a good deal if you shop at Borders more than a few times a year.

The problem comes from having a few people in a row ask about the thing: the store’s ability to actually take payments essentially disappears. The checkout delays because of the card pitch means that I try to avoid Borders, which means that the card isn’t all that valuable to me. Like rain on your wedding day, it is.

Next, we were off to Total Wine. Total Wine is essentially a big-box store devoted to wine. They deal in volume, so they import and distribute a whole lot of things themselves, so if you stick to the right bottles their prices are ridiculously low (Dominus 2003 was $20 more there yesterday than at Costco, though). We bought six bottles of wine, and would have almost certainly have bought more:

1. Had the guy who said he was going to look for more bottles of the Côtes du Rhône Nicole wanted actually done so, at all, instead of just saying he would
2. Had the guy running the wine tasting not looked at us like we smelled bad, and had he actually poured more than two wines rather than pointedly ignoring us.

After I’d managed to get a taste of the oddly smoky sauvignon blanc they were featuring — and after I’d dumped two bottles of it into the basket — the wine-tasting guy looked past me to the suburbanites who were literally shoving me out of the way from behind. I stood there for a while, but as it became clear that he intended to ignore me entirely, I walked off in disgust. In the past few years, we have spent thousands of dollars a year at Total Wine, but I don’t think we’ll be back there any time soon.

As we were leaving — of course, while we were paying, nobody asked whether we’d found everything we needed or anything like that — the pushy suburbanites were also leaving. They’d bought a six-pack of Budweiser. If Total Wine makes a general practice of ignoring people like me in favor of people like that, I don’t think they’ll do very well.

Next, to the Dulles Town Center mall. I specifically wanted to go to the Discovery Channel Store there as part of my months-long quest for a Mooing Can. The web’s premiere Mooing Can vendor, Grandpa’s General Store, is hors de combat for the time being, so I’m still looking in the physical world. The Discovery Channel Store seems to stock Mooing Cans, but when I was last in there they were out: they only had Quacking Cans, Baa-ing cans, etc.: the Moo is the most popular, and so it sells out the quickest.

Well, as it turned out the Dulles Town Center Discovery Channel Store was out of business. It appeared on the mall directories, but it was closed.

Nicole bought a skirt and a couple other things I can’t remember at H&M. There was one person in front of us in line, and even though we showed up when her transaction was essentially complete, we had to wait about five minutes for her merchandise to be folded. By the time our purchases were folded and we were able to leave, there were ten people in line behind us.

We went into Macy’s to look for men’s cologne, because I’d liked one of the colognes they were selling at Banana Republic — most of the other merchandise there was too shoddy to consider — but didn’t like that their smallest size was in fact fairly large and $45. I don’t wear cologne that often, so I prefer it in small quantities. Alas, at the Dulles Town Center mall Macy’s, all the men’s cologne testers are kept behind the counter, and can be sampled only by dealing with the salesperson.

So we were off to the Tyson’s Corner Mall for reasons that I can’t quite remember right now. The attraction was probably the two H&Ms there.

The Apple Store provided us with a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse in an amazingly painless experience, considering that there were about 150 people in there. The fact that Apple wasn’t able to sell me anything else, though, might be kind of troubling. Their computer line is a little dated, and the whole iPod universe seems to be on hold for the iPhone later this year. Apple’s products have long been like this; they move ahead in lurches and remain static for a long time in between. If I were Steve Jobs, I would try to arrange for the larger physical Apple Stores to stock as many random Mac-compatible gizmos as possible. Apple could easily have got a few hundred dollars out of me had they actually had anything to sell.

H&M at the Tyson’s Corner Mall was a total bust. They had a bunch of interesting things that they hadn’t had at the smaller store at the other mall, but at no point did the line for the cash registers have fewer than twenty people in it. H&M has some great values, but when you figure in the cost of twenty minutes in line, it’s a less attractive proposition.

We were feeling faint by this time, so we headed to Gordon Biersch for some refreshment. The inclusion of actual restaurants, if only chain restaurants, in the mall is a welcome improvement. After a few hours of shopping the last thing you need is to deal with the food court, which in terms of sensory stimulation is the rest of the mall times ten, plus indigestion. The wait for a table at Gordon Biersch was an hour and a half, though. We could seat ourselves in the bar, the door girl said: but in practice only if we seated ourselves on the floor.

So we went to Sbarro, which avoids the Gordon Biersch problem by being as unwelcoming and unpleasant as possible. They have had the same tears in the upholstery there for several years now. Recent innovations at Sbarro include removing all the prices (and all the individual dishes) from the menu. All of them. The menu is now nothing but a few giant pictures of food, and the prices of three ‘combos’: that is, a meal involving X, a salad, and a drink, where X is pizza, pasta, or a calzone. The prices of everything else are a mystery.

They also now parcel out napkins from behind the counter, giving you enough to wipe your hands but not to wipe the tables, which they don’t seem to be doing themselves. They’ve also now chained the parmesan-cheese shakers to the counter.

The Tysons Corner Mall is interesting in that you can effectively teleport from one end of the mall to the other if you exit Nordstrom, walk about 100 feet down the sidewalk, and re-enter the mall by another door.

At one point, we were cutting through Nordstrom to do this, and we stopped at the men’s shoes display table to casually admire some of these sneaker-looking non-sneaker shoes that all the hipsters are wearing these days. A shoe guy asked whether we needed any help, and 30 minutes later we were walking out with $700 worth of shoes.

I do not think the retail industry can possibly understand just how much money they are leaving on the table by making shopping such a miserable, time-consuming experience. I understand that a cold Saturday afternoon is going to be a particularly busy time at the mall, but I do not understand at all why this should take the mall’s tenants by surprise.

Apple could have sold me more had they had anything on offer; H&M could have sold Nicole more had they been able to take money efficiently. Total Wine could have sold us more had the wine-tasting guy not, for some inexplicable reason, decided that we were not people he was interested in selling to.

Nordstrom got seven hundred dollars out of me for three pairs of shoes simply because their salesman made the effort, because it wasn’t made into an onerous task for me, and because he was willing to work with me to find shoes that my feet actually fit into. (My feet are 9-1/2 EEE, and since casual, non-hideous EEE shoes are rare, I effectively have to buy size 11-1/2 shoes and lace them tightly; but most shoe salesmen balk at this, preferring to bring out shoes that fit the length of my feet but not the width.)

And this is really the idea behind all of my customer service rants: what is it costing American business, and American society, to have shopping be such a lousy experience? The next time, we’re not going to bother with Total Wine. We’re not going to try to buy anything at H&M. We’ll order whatever we want online. While this process is also full of frustration — nobody seems to take their delivery guarantees seriously — it’s not as bad as going to the mall.

And because we won’t be at the mall, even if they manage to open a restaurant there that can both handle the load and that’s better than Sbarro won’t get our business. And the guy selling your-name-on-a-grain-of-rice from a cart won’t get our business. I mean, he wouldn’t get it anyway, but this way there’s absolutely no chance he will, even if he’s selling something that I’d want to buy.

And, even though they’ve done nothing wrong, Nordstrom isn’t going to get our business, because while Nordstrom is fine, the 300 other stores they’re stuck to are not worth the trouble.

If it keeps up long enough, soon the only people willing to put up with this B.S. will be teenagers, who have a lot of spare time. Unfortunately, they don’t have all that much money.