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Originally Posted by zenithfan1
I had a similar experience with Fedex and a '49 Muntz. They insisted on picking it back up and I never saw it again after I said I wanted it back no matter what.
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FedEx will ALWAYS find a way to either steal the item or duck out of paying a claim without so much as an inspection of the damage. My first bad experience with FedEx involved a Tektronix Type 465 Oscilloscope which was sold to me as a working unit on eBay, but was delivered DOA. The trouble was obvious. A component had been displaced due to rough handling in shipment, causing an internal short. When I reported the damage, FedEx insisted on picking up the item to "inspect" it in order to process the claim for the hour of labor and cost of a new fuse for which I had billed them in the damage report. I never saw the scope again, and they insisted it never arrived at their claims department. My suspicion is that they used the information which my damage report provided to fix the scope and fence it somewhere. That was in 2002. I never chose FedEx again. I also identify technical information obtained in troubleshooting of shipping damage as protected "Work Product" under the law, thereby exercising my right to withhold information which could potentially be used by an unscrupulous employee of a freight carrier to aid in subsequent repair of a damaged item which became "lost" according to official company documents. The manner in which I apply that policy is: Provided the shipper agrees that the item is not to be removed from my premises, I will provide technical details of the damage for their reporting. I will also authorize an unlimited number of photographs of the item to be taken on-site and perform any disassembly tasks on-site which may be necessary to make critical areas visible for photography. If the shipper insists on removing the item for any reason, such removal is authorized only with appropriate documentation, photographs of the employee and his/her credentials, and under the supervision of two witnesses.
In 2008, a client made the mistake of using FedEx to ship the two cartons containing his RCA 621TS and its extremely-rare 7DP4 CRT. When I called FedEx to report the damage, I informed them that a similar incident had been handled by another carrier with an on-site inspection, and that past bad experience with items being "lost" by FedEx en-route to be "inspected" would require that they handle the claim for the 7DP4 in the same manner. First, FedEx insisted that SENDERS are responsible for initiating all damage claims and that I would need the sender to submit the report. After I asked the sender to report the damage, he informed me that they had already dismissed the claim as soon as the word "antique" was mentioned, on the grounds that no guarantee of safe delivery of "used items" was expressed or implied under Terms and Conditions for the Insurance they had sold him. Conveniently, that clause isn't mentioned at the time when the Insurance product is sold and the premium added to the shipping charges.