Cannot say enough bad things about OnTrac. They routinely throw packages at the end of our driveway instead of leaving at the porch like everyone else does.
The end of the (long) driveway is treed so sometimes we are literally hunting in the woods for our package after an OnTrac delivery.
OnTrac is the only company where I've had to call dispatch and request that they put a note on our address saying not to throw packages over the 10-foot gate onto hard concrete steps.
And I had to do that 3 times before they actually stopped.
OnTrac is the worst, in Palo Alto the Ontrac guys would drop off every single package they had from Amazon at our Apartment Leasing office after they were closed, so you'd often find 5+ packages sitting on the doorfront in the evening, instead of delivering the packages to the apartment locations (which are clearly labeled and very public)
Now in Oregon I ordered winter tires, Ontrac marked them delivered on the delivery date but never actually dropped them off, later and they decided to deliver 4 days later once I complained to the Shipper.
It's all anecdotal but the moment I see anything delivered by Ontrac I just assume it has a 50/50 chance of being actually delivered.
Oh man. I live on Market too. OnTrac has done that same exact thing before, and sometimes I only discover it because someone passing on the street or a neighbor rings my doorbell to let me know I have a box outside. They also don't seem to be able to read, as they will accidentally deliver packages to xx30 when we're xx20 and vice versa.
I hate them so much. I go out of my way to leave terrible feedback for shipping on every OnTrac package I get at this point. Their reps keep telling me they're not going to do it any more and still it's such terrible service that I would cancel Prime membership if it wasn't for most packages being delivered by UPS/FedEx/USPS.
When I lived at home with my parents we had a similar problem. Our driveway is also 1/8 of a mile or so and half of it lined with bradford pear trees. They form a very pretty but low canopy over the road. If the UPS or Fedex driver were to go through it would scratch the roof of the truck. Which they also get blamed for. So they end up leaving stuff right where the pear trees start. It also causes problems when there is a different driver and they tend to leave the package in other less than predictable places on our property.
They get it all the way to the porch? I've had USPS people leave packages in the driveway because walking the 25' feet from the vehicle to the porch is too much to expect.
Don't have too much trouble with porch pirates up here on my 2.5 acre property in Alaska. Though, sometimes UPS/FedEx drivers can't make it up my hill in the winter and decide to just lean a package up against a tree. That's annoying because I receive a delivery notification and then have to go hunt for it.
It's definitely a regional thing. For us UPS is awful- we live on "first" street and they constantly deliver our packages to the same house number only on "second" street.
Nothing is worse than finding out a package was shipped with OnTrac though.
Your #1 is my main complaint. I live at the end of a long gravel driveway which is admittedly not always in the best of shape, especially in the winter. UPS (and other non-USPS) carriers still have no choice but to come down the driveway. USPS will often do things like hang boxes of the mailbox (where they've been stolen from time to time) or jam them into the mailbox. (The situation has gotten somewhat better since I got a huge mailbox that can accommodate most packages.)
Ontrac lies on their track. Had a package get reported as delivered one day, but it actually arrived the next morning. I happened to actually be leaving my apartment right as the guy was walking up. I really wanted to ask him why the tracking reported the package already delivered when it wasn't, but I had to get to work and didn't have the time.
I think I can echo having a list package from my mailbox vs front door and it has everything to do with FedEx/Ontrac/UPS leaving the box at my front door.
One of my favorites is the recommended carrier of Monoprice, Norcon, that emails you a photo of the delivered package once delivered.
Ontrac is a west coast delivery service, and from what I can tell they keep prices low by using mid-90s beater white minivans with a company logo magnet and issuing their employees a polo T uniform.
I'm in SF and Amazon packages use Ontrac. Ontrac appears to use contractors that just have a sticker on the side of their car with the logo. In the last month alone I've had them forge multiple signatures + report a package as delivered when I've been home all day and nothing arrived. And other times they throw it a decent distance or put it in front and it's stolen within five minutes.
Amazon re-ships via UPS/other and it arrives acceptably. The worst UPS has done is not knock/ring and that's rare.
90%+ of my packages via Ontrac had forged signatures, misreported delivery statuses, not actually arriving, [...]
OnTrac likes to just leave packages in front of my door. On Market Street in San Francisco and mark the packages signed by "Door." Once in a while they'll ring the doorbell, but often I'll just find it there. So far, no one has stolen anything, but boy does it make me nervous.
Here we either collect packages from a distribution place or a courier will hand delivery and have somebody sign for the delivery - leaving a package on a porch is rather baffling.
Meanwhile, it is quite stunning to me that European carriers would intentionally mis-deliver (i.e. leave with a neighbor) packages rather than just leaving them on the porch! Over many years and many neighbors, I've had plenty who I would be happy to let receive my packages and plenty I would very much not. Likewise, I would be quite peeved as a permanent WFH-er to be the neighborhood final delivery guy.
There are plenty of places in the US where packages left on the porch aren't secure, but there are also plenty of places where it's completely fine and saves everyone time. I've never once had a package stolen off my porch anywhere from an apartment in the Bay Area to a house on 10 acres in rural Oregon. I really think that the places where package theft is rampant are the exception, not the rule.
The major shipping carriers offer a service where you can have them put packages inside a garage door or other place.
Even then I find about half of my packages still end up on the front porch despite me indicating otherwise using the carrier's service to indicate where to leave packages. I haven’t had a package stolen in very many years so I guess that’s a good thing.
Amazon used to use ONTRAC to deliver packages to me that did the same thing (complete with the unbranded vans). They stopped after the sixth package was stolen.
The end of the (long) driveway is treed so sometimes we are literally hunting in the woods for our package after an OnTrac delivery.
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