Some summertime absurdity

Quick bit of background=>
Due to health problems, once the outside temp rises above ~72F I stay indoors with the a/c running & only go out at night when it is cooler.

That having been said, I make orders for provisions via free shipping as much as possible.
Places like BJs & Amazon work out well that way for us.

The 1st silliness was from wallyworld.
The order made their free shipping total and got shipped out - via fedex ground.
Several days later the fedex home truck stopped out front as I watched via my front door video, sat a few minutes, then left.
The wally site sent an email saying our address could not be found.
After several days more another fedex home truck stopped out front & then just drove away - must be the large house number was not big enough for them.
No delivery was ever made - so I called & cancelled the undelivered order for a refund.

Thankfully it was still cool enough here for me to go to wally's at night & just buy that stuff in person.

The 2nd silliness was also from wallyworld.
This time the fedex home driver actually dumped a badly damaged box on our porch.
Getting the wally folks to replace the damaged goods was fun (NOT !!).

All the above silliness got me to be very wary of deliveries via fedex 'ground'.

And then...
Just lately the repeated mentions here of the better Freedompop SIM deal got me to have a look at the Target site.
I was quite pleasantly surprised to see that it offers some very nicely priced deals on several needed, generic items, so I made the account & an order that reached their free shipping level.

A week later, a busted up, open, badly damaged box with only 3 of the 4 items it was said to contain got dumped on our porch, of course by a fedex home driver.
The 5th item was the FP SIM, with a supposed arrival date several weeks in the future - via UPS !!

Calling Target had me use 45 minutes+ of my day with a foreign accented rep who has supposedly triggered the replacement of the 3 sticky, gooey items with the 4 items that should have been in that smashed up, opened box.

At this point only time will tell if we will ever get what we paid for ?!?

BUT...
I will NOT be ordering from either of those places online again - most anything else that we may need can be gotten elsewhere or just wait until I am able to move about more freely.

A silly conclusion for a silly story:
The replacements for the destroyed items arrived today - again via fedex HOME.
4 items were replaced.

3, weighing ~30 pounds arrived in a lightweight box that was 1/2 open & very banged up - but the items survived.

The 4th came in a smaller box, also not sealed, also badly banged up - and the item was destroyed beyond use.

Since it is only a $6 item I will not be doing anything about it as it is not worth the time & efforts it will take.

Here is what was shared at their follow-up survey:

Our order weighed 30-40 pounds, was badly packed & damaged in shipping via fedex HOME, originally AND the replacement.
This is far too much unreasonable nonsense.
If we ordered these same items from Amazon or BJs they would arrive quickly, undamaged & therefore hassle free.
We will NOT order for delivery from your site again.

After 2 weeks the FP 100/100 SIM finally arrived.

Logged into the 10/10 line & there is an option to change SIM - so I did that...
It did not work & still showed 10/10 so I called them.

After getting to the usual, outsourced & heavily foreign accented rep, the Q&A session took ~20 minutes of mostly hold time, then it finally got activated.

So now I have both Verizon & AT&T lines to cover our funky service area.
Free AT&T GSMA is hard to beat, but it has definitely been a hassle, mostly because target stinks for home delivery.

Thus ends the tale of very poor home deliveries !!

That's definitely some bad luck. About 2 years ago, I was having all kinds of issues with FedEx Ground. The service was terrible.

It hasn't been so bad lately, which I'm happy for.

I order quite a bit from Amazon, Walmart, and Target, and fortunately haven't had too many issues.

Hi Boz, thanks for replying here.

We reside in a small town along a state highway.
Deliveries via UPS, USPS, REAL fedex & even DHL arrive here fine.

In this area the difference is that fedex GROUND goes to residential areas via fedex HOME - which is a service provided by a separate trucking company that is ~45 minutes drive away from here.

Having investigated this situation, the root of it is that the owner/manager of that company found out after getting under contract that it only pays enough to afford underpaying inexperienced drivers - hence the poor handling and outright carelessness.

Since the online ordering from target & walmart use that service exclusively to keep costs down for their 'free shipping' - the whole situation is only worthy of avoidance IMO.