The UPS Store

Oh hey, I had a completely painless experience here.
You can bring something here and have them pack it, or you can bring something already packed and ready to ship. I suggest the latter because I was able to be in and out within just a few minutes. I went online first and printed out the shipping label I needed and got everything ready to ship, so it was just a matter of handing over my package and getting a receipt. They also sell an assortment of packing materials and boxes, in case you want to stop in and do your own packing and boxing.

This is like any other UPS store with one exception. The employees here just don’t care. Either their Dad owns the franchise or they are all rich. My most recent visit had to wait around for 10 minutes in a store with more employees than customers. Shipped several items for rush shipping. An hour after I left the store, they called my friend who also shipped items to report they found one of his items on the floor and forgot to pack it.

Visit 1 — shipping a $ 4000 item that needs packaged, takes about half an hour for guy at the counter to get to me, leaves my $ 4000 item on the counter to be packaged later, i.e. not in front of me.
Visit 2 — shipping an item, guy at the counter is carrying on a personal telephone conversation the entire time he is handling my shipping order.
Visit 3 — picking up an item, guy at the counter helps another customer for ten minutes. There are four people in line. Two people are working behind the counter but not helping customers.
Conclusion — they need more workers… And better customer service.

I hate shipping. If I need to ship something fragile, I take it here.
The people are nice, and although they always have a television blaring when you walk in, if you go in at the right time of day, you can catch a talk show and find out if Gomer sitting on the chair is or is not the father, but I digress.
Although it can be pricey, things always arrive in the condition in which I left them, and I have yet to have any issues with the service.
Warning, ask when they will actually ship the item if you are in a hurry, because sometimes it takes them a couple days to package large and or fragile items. I don’t understand why it takes a couple days, but they say that it does.
This location takes credit cards. The one in Gretna does not.

As it turns out, there is no FedEx Kinkos on the Westbank. Go figure.
I needed to mail my Christmas cards to Canada — exactly 1 week before Christmas Day. Obviously regular mail wasn’t going to cut it. Then, I had the genius idea to throw all of the cards into one giant envelope and send it via UPS or FedEx. Yeah, it would cost a lot, but it would get there in time! I googled the nearest FedEx (my preferred shipment provider) but would have to drive across one of the bridges to Elmood or Tchoupitoulas. UPS had a location in Harvey — yay!
There was one customer ahead of me in line taking forever, but luckily, they had 2 people working at this location. The service was quick but quite subpar. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by FedEx. Anyhow, he asked for my address and the address for the shipment. Even though I spelled everything out, he still ended up typing part of both addresses incorrectly. I would think that verifying, in print/​writing, before submitting the shipment would be a good idea? Maybe I’m being too logical. I didn’t receive anything to check the spelling for errors until he gave me the receipt.
He also never asked when I wanted it to arrive. Again, maybe it’s that I’m used to FedEx, but they always give me options… earlier arrival = higher cost. In this case, I would have probably chosen the most expensive/​fastest option anyway, but it would have been nice to at least have options.
This would have received a 2 star review, but apparently despite the spelling errors and whatnot, the cards did arrive at my mother’s house today. Good thing the postal code was correct, and the address was at least close enough that they could decode it… sheesh.