You What?

Recently I moved between two US cities. Instead of renting a U-Haul or paying for a whole container shipment, I decided to ship almost all my belongings via UPS — I don’t have any furniture or large items to ship[^1].

Long story short, I bought UPS shipping labels, scheduled a pickup, and completely brain farted thinking that UPS would print and stick the labels on my boxes for me. To make matters worse, the UPS guy didn’t check if my boxes had labels on them. And to make things even more confusing, some of my boxes had old UPS labels on them from previous shipments (these will come into play later).

So, basically, UPS took away 10 boxes that were mostly unlabeled.

Customer Service is of no Use

I didn’t even think about it until about 36 hours later. At some point I thought to check where my packages were, and realized that none of my purchased labels had any tracking activity. It was late, but I started calling UPS customer service.

The first rep was mostly clueless, but genuinely shocked that the pickup driver would take unlabeled packages. I don’t know what their exact procedure is, but you’d think they’d at least scan labels and verify they’re valid before loading packages onto the van. She told me they would return my packages the next day if they weren’t labeled.

Next day, nothing happened. Late that night, I called again. The second rep went back and forth with me, calling various warehouses, and eventually got some kind of manager on the line. The manager told me the warehouse would call me the next day. I couldn’t call them directly, and she wouldn’t even tell me the warehouse location.

As you might have guessed, none of this helped. I even ran into the regular pickup driver (who always serves our area), and he was shocked I hadn’t labeled them. His advice? Call UPS customer service. Thanks.

I called again after getting no callback, and customer service basically said there’s nothing they can do since I didn’t label them.

In total, I wasted about 4 days getting bounced between customer service reps, sometimes waiting on hold for 30+ minutes.

Just Knock on the Door

My professor gave me a piece of advice: “What if you just show up at the UPS warehouse and make a scene?” Without any better alternative, I went to a UPS warehouse marked on Google Maps. Turns out my packages don’t actually go through that location, but after some digging I figured out the right warehouse.

At the right warehouse, people were once again shocked that I managed to hand 10 unlabeled packages to a UPS driver. Someone wrote down my details and said they’d look into it. While I was standing around waiting, a manager walked in and asked if she could help. I told her my story, and it turns out she was the shift manager the night my packages arrived — she even remembered them (I suppose 10 mystery boxes is a rare occurrence). She explained that unlabeled packages get sent to something called UPS Overgoods, and that there’s a process to get them back, it just takes a while. No customer service rep had ever mentioned this to me.

She went to check whether my boxes were still at the warehouse, but they had already been shipped off to Overgoods, as she suspected. She even asked me if I’d had a frustrating experience with customer service, and said she wished I could have just contacted the warehouse directly. I told her I wished that too.

In the end, the manager took down my info along with my purchased but unused labels, and told me to wait for her to sort it out.

Nobody Actually Knows What Happens

With the warehouse manager on the case, I felt confident enough to move on to the new city. A few days later, one of my packages finally showed tracking movement. Progress!

But just as I thought this nightmare was over, something unexpected happened. I got an email from a package locker app for a place I lived 5 years ago. Strange, I thought. But just in case it had something to do with my current package situation — remember those old labels I mentioned? — I asked a friend nearby to check it out.

IT WAS INDEED MY PACKAGES.

Somehow, UPS had looked at one of the old labels and decided that a bunch of packages belonged to that address. A week or so later, I got another locker notification. In total, I recovered all but one of my packages from the old address’s locker.

Lesson

I don’t think there’s a real lesson here other than: label your packages, and remove old labels. But it’s remarkable to me how, between the pickup driver, customer service, and warehouse workers, nobody actually knows what happens to unlabeled packages. Everyone was equally surprised and equally clueless. The system just kind of… figures it out eventually, in the most chaotic way possible.