UPS Stolen Parcel From Their Depot

eskbanker

VHSVideoGuy said:

I just do not understand how this is allowed to happen?

It's not so much that it's allowed to happen, just that it inevitably does happen - any business involving manual handling of perhaps millions of packages will sometimes lose track of some of them, just like any other courier service, Royal Mail, airlines with luggage, etc, etc.  Obviously the package doesn't just vanish into thin air, but any number of things could have happened, including theft, but more likely damage, label becoming detached, system problems, etc, and in a high volume business it becomes impractical to chase around after all such exceptions....

Aylesbury_Duck

I'd have thought that the likelihood of the contents being stolen is tiny.  Who is going to steal 100 VHS recordings of Italian music TV shows from 30 years ago, other than another person with the same (very niche) interest?  If another person with that niche interest exists, I suspect OP would know them.  The likelihood of them working at the very UPS depot handling OP's parcel?  Vanishingly small.

I hope you find them, because I do appreciate the work people like you put in to making these old materials available for the rest of us.

WhiskersTheWonderCat

Aylesbury_Duck said:

I'd have thought that the likelihood of the contents being stolen is tiny.  Who is going to steal 100 VHS recordings of Italian music TV shows from 30 years ago, other than another person with the same (very niche) interest?  If another person with that niche interest exists, I suspect OP would know them.  The likelihood of them working at the very UPS depot handling OP's parcel?  Vanishingly small.

I hope you find them, because I do appreciate the work people like you put in to making these old materials available for the rest of us.

I was just about the comment the same thing. And I can't imagine some avid 1990s Italian Music TV fan being able to smuggle 13KG of VHS tapes out of the depot under their coat unnoticed. 

Did you purchase these tapes? Or did you get them for free? You should always insure them for the amount you paid for them. If you paid more than £50 for them, then that's the risk you take in not insuring them fully. 

VHSVideoGuy

WhiskersTheWonderCat said:

Aylesbury_Duck said:

I'd have thought that the likelihood of the contents being stolen is tiny.  Who is going to steal 100 VHS recordings of Italian music TV shows from 30 years ago, other than another person with the same (very niche) interest?  If another person with that niche interest exists, I suspect OP would know them.  The likelihood of them working at the very UPS depot handling OP's parcel?  Vanishingly small.

I hope you find them, because I do appreciate the work people like you put in to making these old materials available for the rest of us.

I was just about the comment the same thing. And I can't imagine some avid 1990s Italian Music TV fan being able to smuggle 13KG of VHS tapes out of the depot under their coat unnoticed. 

Did you purchase these tapes? Or did you get them for free? You should always insure them for the amount you paid for them. If you paid more than £50 for them, then that's the risk you take in not insuring them fully. 

This is the crux of the situation... How do you insure them properly? 100 tapes recorded from Italian TV are mostly UK/USA bands playing on Italian TV but and it's a big but.... These are a loan I do not pay for them I pay only the return postage, whatever they are valued at I will have to pay duty then when I box them up to return there will be duty for me to pay again, given that we're talking well over a thousand tapes a year this becomes an even bigger problem, now add to that that no amount of money will return those missing tapes and how many people recorded rock music on Italian TV 30 yrs ago and kept the recordings... Not many and unique tapes are ones people took a video camera into a show and filmed it themselves so there is only one copy, and now that one copy that never left the guys house in Rome since he fiiin 1994 is in a black hole in the UPS warehouse and will eventually be?.. Destroyed? Thrown in a skip? And I get no answer as to what has happened just a customer service runaround.
Its absolutely soul destroying and moving forward I now have to post further tapes knowing that the same thing can happen again and again.
I hope I've explained myself better than the original post and thank you everyone for your replies I fear you're all correct and I'm flogging a dead horse (Dramatically) 

Wonka_2

VHSVideoGuy said:

This is the crux of the situation... How do you insure them properly? 100 tapes recorded from Italian TV are mostly UK/USA bands playing on Italian TV but and it's a big but.... These are a loan I do not pay for them I pay only the return postage, whatever they are valued at I will have to pay duty then when I box them up to return there will be duty for me to pay again, given that we're talking well over a thousand tapes a year this becomes an even bigger problem, now add to that that no amount of money will return those missing tapes and how many people recorded rock music on Italian TV 30 yrs ago and kept the recordings... Not many and unique tapes are ones people took a video camera into a show and filmed it themselves so there is only one copy, and now that one copy that never left the guys house in Rome since he fiiin 1994 is in a black hole in the UPS warehouse and will eventually be?.. Destroyed? Thrown in a skip? And I get no answer as to what has happened just a customer service runaround.
Its absolutely soul destroying and moving forward I now have to post further tapes knowing that the same thing can happen again and again.
I hope I've explained myself better than the original post and thank you everyone for your replies I fear you're all correct and I'm flogging a dead horse (Dramatically) 

The reality is you don't insure against it given they're priceless - but you can mitigate against it either via a trusted individual rather than a faceless company or by doing it yourself (given the weight/value involved by the time you've insured then a cheap return flight/day out might be preferable) 

Aylesbury_Duck

It's unlikely to happen again and again.  How long have you been doing this, and how many consignments have been lost?

user1977

Obviously the safer method would be to get them digitised locally, rather than entrust them to international box-shifters (who consider the box to be worth somewhere less than £50).

Or fly over and fetch them yourself (yes, airlines sometimes lose luggage, but the risk is probably smaller than with any cheap courier option).

Undervalued

Aylesbury_Duck said:

It's unlikely to happen again and again.  How long have you been doing this, and how many consignments have been lost?

Exactly!

All of these parcel services work to a low price in a very competitive market. The vast majority of all parcels get delivered without a problem and you only tend to hear about the tiny percentage when something goes wrong.

The default legal position for civil claims in the UK, for generations, has been that correctly addressed mail is delivered. A civil court works on the balance of probabilities (i.e. 51% likely) and with traditional post having a provable success rate of over 99% you will have a devil of a job to convince a judge that "I didn't get the letter"!

So, you either have to accept the odds or find a more secure / expensive courier in the hope that they are better. You probably can add "lost in transit" insurance to most business insurance packages. You certain could back in my day. However you will need to be able to demonstrate a value, not pluck a figure out of the air, and make very sure you comply with the terms and conditions. 

MattMattMattUK

VHSVideoGuy said:

WhiskersTheWonderCat said:

Aylesbury_Duck said:

I'd have thought that the likelihood of the contents being stolen is tiny.  Who is going to steal 100 VHS recordings of Italian music TV shows from 30 years ago, other than another person with the same (very niche) interest?  If another person with that niche interest exists, I suspect OP would know them.  The likelihood of them working at the very UPS depot handling OP's parcel?  Vanishingly small.

I hope you find them, because I do appreciate the work people like you put in to making these old materials available for the rest of us.

I was just about the comment the same thing. And I can't imagine some avid 1990s Italian Music TV fan being able to smuggle 13KG of VHS tapes out of the depot under their coat unnoticed. 

Did you purchase these tapes? Or did you get them for free? You should always insure them for the amount you paid for them. If you paid more than £50 for them, then that's the risk you take in not insuring them fully. 

This is the crux of the situation... How do you insure them properly? 100 tapes recorded from Italian TV are mostly UK/USA bands playing on Italian TV but and it's a big but.... These are a loan I do not pay for them I pay only the return postage, whatever they are valued at I will have to pay duty then when I box them up to return there will be duty for me to pay again, given that we're talking well over a thousand tapes a year this becomes an even bigger problem, now add to that that no amount of money will return those missing tapes and how many people recorded rock music on Italian TV 30 yrs ago and kept the recordings... Not many and unique tapes are ones people took a video camera into a show and filmed it themselves so there is only one copy, and now that one copy that never left the guys house in Rome since he fiiin 1994 is in a black hole in the UPS warehouse and will eventually be?.. Destroyed? Thrown in a skip? And I get no answer as to what has happened just a customer service runaround.
Its absolutely soul destroying and moving forward I now have to post further tapes knowing that the same thing can happen again and again.
I hope I've explained myself better than the original post and thank you everyone for your replies I fear you're all correct and I'm flogging a dead horse (Dramatically) 

Unfortunately you are. All couriers have a delay rate and a loss rate, though they rarely if ever publish these. My company sends several thousand consignments a year though different couriers and via Royal Mail and as a rule they are all <1% for delays and lost packages per year are less than ten. I have had packages delayed for months on occasion, I had one turn up after more than a year (it had been written off long before that point) but most of the delays are only one day for UK shipments or occasional a few days with customs issues on international shipments. The back end of last year every courier had much higher delays and Royal Mail had about 5% of packages taking more than a week so that was far than ideal, but it was caused by the strikes at Royal Mail and the wider knock on effect of that.

In terms of other packages going missing it is likely that it will happen again at some point if you send enough consignments, but the rate is very low overall. One thing I can recommend is to make sure that there are your details inside the package as well as on the outside, sometimes a label becomes detached, the outside box gets damaged etc. If goods are in an inner carton and that is labelled, and/or there are other details inside the box so that when it is opened as it has lost it's label the owner can be tracked down that will help, although again the rate of it going missing in the first place is very low.

Edit to add, last year (2022) my business sent out 6,346 consignments, some of which could have contained multiple packages, in total two were lost.

peter_the_piper

If its any help, a parcel was sent to me on 8th december by Evri and was eventually received by me at the end of January. Don't lose all hope, they could still turn up.