I think the only thing it confirms is that UPS has been getting a lot of angry would-be iPhone owners contacting them, and they have boilerplate text to throw at people who ask why their iPhone is stuck in Zhengzhou/Incheon/Chek Lap Cok/Timbuktu.
In that chat, the same copypasta was regurgitated twice about "due to special apple shipping plans." The more likely truth is, the agent doesn't know what's happening any more than you do, but instead of saying that, they are instructed to use this boilerplate text to deflect, deflect, deflect, and hope someone sane throws your box into the right plane soon.
If "Apple Shipping Plans" truly restricted when people were getting their packages, no one in the Oct 1-7 group could have had their phones until at least today. And I doubt UPS would really hold a package that long for them. A day, maybe. Not a week or more. A huge shipper like UPS typically wants a package in and out of its system as quickly as possible, especially when 10 million other packages are similarly flooding their capacity.
I say "typically," because there's no accounting for stupid, and I think that's all that's going on here. People at UPS being overwhelmed, causing the stupid to come out.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I think I'm more upset in that my husbands phone, which was ordered maybe 30 minutes earlier, will be here tomorrow. What the heck!
