Home depot, ups

The Home Depot parking lot looks much different at 9am than it does at 6pm. At 9am the lot is filled with non-descript white vans with tool/ladder racks on the top, etc... Inside are contractors stocking up on supplies for the days work.

At 6pm the parking lot is filled with mostly SUVs. These are the yuppies that are running to get parts etc... for their home DIY projects (DIY = Do It Yourself - also a term which I mostly despise).

conclusion of this observation = none

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UPS has a neat feature on their website (old skoolers would access the feature over the phone). This feature is not new as it has probably been around 8-10 years at least. Basically you tell them when your package is ready to be picked up and then they come and get it from your house or office or wherever. Depending on what type of account you have, the service is either free or costs between $2 and $4 per package. All of the major private delivery services (Fedex, DHL) have this ability though it is best serviced through UPS. It is really cool that you can do this. I wish the USPS could do this. In fact I wish the USPS could do a lot of things that it either doesn't currently do or does sucky.

The major beef I have with the UPS "Schedule a pickup" service is their timeframe option. You tell them when the package will be ready and when is the latest time during the day in which they can pick it up. I find that drivers either ignore these fields or simply think they don't matter. Often times I schedule a pickup for a time later in the day, to make certain UPS comes, yet also to give me time to get my package ready. The driver usually comes to get the package either way before the scheduled time or sometime after the time I say that we close. Why even have the option if the drivers are never going to abide by it?