Which Shipping Company is the Most Careful with Your Packages?

As a tech journalist, I receive many packages to my door each week, and over the past five-and-a-half years that Techgage has existed, I’ve seen a fair number of solid deliveries and also total wrecks. There are a number of shipping companies I’ll receive packages from, including FedEX, UPS, DHL, among others, and more often than not, I’ll be able to guess the quality my package before the delivery guy even gets out of his truck.

It’s no secret that shipping companies don’t always take the utmost care with your packages, and in my case, it’s been UPS that’s been horrible over the years. About half of the packages I receive through that company look like they’ve been kicked around a couple of times, while I’ve had the opposite experience with FedEX, which has been fantastic for me. Unfortunately, my experiences aren’t worth holding much credence in, because depending on where you live, your experience could be completely different.

With shipping companies being all over the board with their reliability, Popular Mechanics decided to create a test to see which of the big three in the US were the most careful with their packages. The author worked with National Instruments in order to design a proper device that would monitor g-force, temperature, orientation, vibration and other things. The goal was to see which company was the most careful, from the moment the package is picked up, to the point of delivery.

The overall results don’t quite place one company far above the rest, but in the end, USPS was the most careful with the packages. The biggest point to take away from these tests is not so much which company treated the packages the best, but the fact that whenever a package was marked with “fragile” or “this end up”, they were actually treated worse! Surprised? Yeah, me neither.

How does the data stack up? In our modest experiment—12 trips, three carriers, three cities—FedEx delivered the most big bumps, with an average of three acceleration spikes over 6 g’s (equivalent to a 2.5-foot drop) per trip. The USPS was the gentlest yet also the most active handler, with an average 12.5 position changes per trip. UPS was tops at keeping our package upright.