My Teenage Son's Election Day Vote: No to UPS (and Amazon Release Day Delivery)!

Today was Election Day which meant two things for my teenage son: 1) No School in his district and  2) Halo 4 was released! Combine those two facts and he thought it meant one thing for him - a full day at home playing Halo 4 with the millions of other young males celebrating democracy together on their Xbox 360's. However, he had made one fatal mistake. He pre-ordered his copy of Halo 4 at Amazon.com using their "release day shipping" option. If he had read the fine print, Amazon states that their shipping agent (namely UPS in this case) does not guarantee delivery at any specific time, only that it will arrive on that day before 7:00 pm. And when did his copy arrive? The UPS truck finally showed up at 5:45 pm which meant he only had 3 hours or so to immerse himself with Master Chief and company. And he had actually paid extra to receive it that late, when he could have paid less and just picked it up at GameStop hours before, like the location less than a mile away from our house at the Galleria. There are some advantages to bricks and mortar retailers, especially when you want something precisely when it is released and not be at the mercy of shippers like UPS or FedEx. I am sure UPS has a priority to ship to companies and organizations that close at 5:00 pm earlier than residential customers, since I know at the university we receive our UPS shipments every day between 12 and 2 pm. When tracking packages I notice once they arrive in St. Louis, they all leave the Earth City location on a truck at 6 am or so. Our university shipments arrive early afternoon, but the ones we receive at home sometimes arrive well into the early evening. I do not think my son will be preordering anything using "release day delivery" ever again from Amazon. Now we all know better. It is definitely not worth the extra cost to get the release "early" when it is not truly guaranteed to arrive early on that day.

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