TL;DR - Simply what's your story - good or bad - with shipping?
Ten days ago the Kala Spruce/Flame Mahogany (sale + 20% off) uke I ordered started its journey to me from the West to East Coast. At first the trip was supposed to take 14 days, but FedEx must have found faster ways to keep it moving to me in ten days. If it arrives today I'll let it sit for a day or two before opening. However, it did make me think about its journey here. The ten stops on the way meant different distribution centers - ten of them. That means ten on and off nine FedEx trucks with the final one going to USPS for delivery to me.
Many, many years ago, the second worst job I ever had was unloading one of these 40 foot trailers. Nothing mattered except how fast we could empty the trailer; The stopwatch was started when the doors opened and stopped when the trailer was empty. The word "fragile" didn't enter into the calculation. It took a while to learn to take a package and push it down the rollers in the center of the trailer without turning around, which meant that while learning this move, a package or two would fall off the rollers before making it to the conveyor belt for it's trip to the next truck. So knowing this, I'm hoping my ukulele is well-packaged, didn't take too many falls/bumps, and was not under too many 70 pound packages in the trip to me.
I'll update this post when I finally open the package, but now I'm wondering if others have had good or bad luck with this kind of ground shipping of ukuleles.
Ten days ago the Kala Spruce/Flame Mahogany (sale + 20% off) uke I ordered started its journey to me from the West to East Coast. At first the trip was supposed to take 14 days, but FedEx must have found faster ways to keep it moving to me in ten days. If it arrives today I'll let it sit for a day or two before opening. However, it did make me think about its journey here. The ten stops on the way meant different distribution centers - ten of them. That means ten on and off nine FedEx trucks with the final one going to USPS for delivery to me.
Many, many years ago, the second worst job I ever had was unloading one of these 40 foot trailers. Nothing mattered except how fast we could empty the trailer; The stopwatch was started when the doors opened and stopped when the trailer was empty. The word "fragile" didn't enter into the calculation. It took a while to learn to take a package and push it down the rollers in the center of the trailer without turning around, which meant that while learning this move, a package or two would fall off the rollers before making it to the conveyor belt for it's trip to the next truck. So knowing this, I'm hoping my ukulele is well-packaged, didn't take too many falls/bumps, and was not under too many 70 pound packages in the trip to me.
I'll update this post when I finally open the package, but now I'm wondering if others have had good or bad luck with this kind of ground shipping of ukuleles.