Highly recommended - if you like having your deliveries stolen!
My experience with the store at 14 Murray Street: I ordered a laptop from Dell and initially planned to have it shipped to my home. At the last minute -- literally at around 10 p.m. on the night before the package was scheduled to be delivered -- I asked UPS to redirect the shipment to this store, which is near my workplace, where it could be safely held until I could pick it up after work. On the morning of the delivery day, I check the UPS tracking website and see that, at around 9 a.m, my laptop has been delivered to the UPS store near where I work. Great!
At the end of the day I head to the UPS store and ask for my package. The employee tells me that they don't have any packages for pickup. The way she says it suggests that they have not had any packages delivered that day. I am confused and pull up the tracking information on my phone, thinking that maybe I came to the wrong place. Nope: I'm in the right place, but now the tracking website says that someone signed for my package at 5:13 p.m. I show this to the employee, and her story changes. Now there *was* a package delivered for pickup after all, and someone did sign for it. But that "someone," she suddenly remembers very clearly, had my UPS tracking number and my government-issued photo ID.
I find this very interesting, because I only have two forms of government-issued photo ID (my drivers license and my passport). My license is in my wallet, and my passport is at home in my nightstand. No one other than me and the people at Dell knew I had ordered this laptop, and no one other than me and the people at UPS knew that I had asked for it to be redirected to this UPS store.
So: even if someone somehow knew that I had ordered a laptop -- and even if that person got hold of my tracking number -- and even if that person forged a passable government ID with my name on it -- that person still would have somehow needed to find out that at the very last possible moment I asked UPS to redirect the package from home delivery to this specific UPS store. This seems unlikely to me. I tell the UPS employee as much. At that point I am redirected to the manager.
To her credit, the manager is polite and apologetic. To her discredit, the extent of the assistance she offers is to provide me with UPS's central customer service number. I thank her for the number and explain that I will also be filing a police report. At that point, she becomes more helpful and finds the store security camera footage. She shows me some still images from the footage. The images show my package being given to someone (someone who is not me) by a store employee. According to the manager, the footage also shows the employee checking the person's ID -- but the manager declines to show me that part of the footage. Of course not -- why would you want to provide evidence of your employee following procedure? She takes my email address and promises to email me the footage. As of today, I have not received it.
I try to be a nice person, and I don't want to accuse anyone of stealing when I don't have proof. So I'll let you decide which of these two scenarios is more likely to be true:
Scenario 1: I was the victim of some kind of hacker who gained access to my email as well as to my UPS My Choice account (two separate, unrelated passwords). He probably couldn't have gotten the package if it had been sent to my home, which is in a locked apartment building, but luckily for him he happened to be up late and logged in to my UPS account and he noticed that I had redirected the package to a UPS store. ALSO luckily for him, this hacker happens to live close enough to me to beat me to the UPS store on the delivery date to claim my package. He managed to do all this even though he ALSO had to take the time to acquire or construct a fake government-issued ID with my name on it.
So that's Scenario 1.
Scenario 2: A store employee noticed an expensive laptop and arranged for a friend to come "pick it up."
Both of these scenarios are possible. But while Scenario 1 involves a magical hacker who catches a lot of lucky breaks on his quixotic quest to steal a single laptop, Scenario 2 is more straightforward. Scenario 2 does not require the hacking of two separate online accounts, it does not require the constant monitoring of my email to watch for a purchase worth stealing, it does not require a fake ID, it does not require late-night monitoring of the UPS website to see if the package is redirected somewhere, and it does not require the thief coincidentally beating me to the UPS store. All Scenario 2 requires is ordinary, plain old human dishonesty.
If you believe, as I do, that the simplest answer is usually the correct one, then I urge you not to give this store your business unless you are comfortable living with the possibility of your items being "lost." read more