I'm in the "stuck in Zhengzhou" club for my 6+ 128GB, shipping to Maryland.
Location Date Local Time Activity
ZhengZhou, China 10/01/2014 4:30 P.M. Departure Scan
ZhengZhou, China 09/30/2014 5:15 P.M. Departure Scan
ZhengZhou, China 09/26/2014 11:31 P.M. Arrival Scan
09/26/2014 10:54 P.M. Location Scan
09/26/2014 4:18 P.M. Origin Scan
China 09/26/2014 8:22 P.M. Order Processed: Ready for UPS
A lot of us on the 5:15pm and 4:30pm departure scans, I'm not lucky enough to have made the mystery mileage run to Incheon yet, if that's even in the cards for my phone.
There's gotta be something screwy going on with UPS, either their capacity or their tracking. They're showing me a Monday 10/6 delivery, which still beats the original expectation of 10/13-20, but I ordered within 6 hours of the opening bell, which was a letdown to begin with. But now it's an extra letdown to know that it was shipped and is somewhere on its way but has been rotting in a warehouse in Zhengzhou for five days now.
Its not that their backed up, its that they are holding shipments by request of Apple so as not to exceed the original delivery dates.
Do you have a source on this, or is this sheer speculation?
I cannot imagine it would be true. I can't imagine what the business rationale for this would be. You want to underpromise and overdeliver, not underpromise and then purposely underdeliver when you could have overdelivered. In the meantime, holding shipments would create a colossal logistics, storage, and sorting nightmare for UPS that would be immensely costly. If they did want to do that, it would make much more sense for Apple to hold them themselves. And why would anyone, at Apple or UPS, invite the PR nightmare inherent in that ever getting out?
"We told UPS to hold shipments that could have been delivered to our customers who paid hundreds of dollars for a phone, just because, no reason really, just we wanted to make them wait longer."
"We allowed Apple to tell us to slow down our package deliveries; they didn't really tell us why but we figured it was OK to be complicit in screwing our customers over, even when it cost us extra money and headaches, because, hey, we're UPS, and we hate our customers, and don't mind if you know it."
I know people love to hate on business, but this just doesn't make any business sense at all.