my car part via fedex package left nashville at 4am and arrived in stpaul mn at 9pm. standard slow shipping. not overnight or rush. so i am thinking truck? the drive is about 12-13 hrs. i thought truck drivers are limited to how much they can drive in 24hrs? do fedex trucks has 2 drivers? or do they contract it out to other firms that have any rule they want? than it left stpaul at midnight and arrived at rogers mn at 5am which is a shipping depot on the NW side of mpls. about a 50 mi drive. i wonder why it took 5 hrs to go 50 miles?
Yup.
In the USA, a truck driver can drive for a maximum of 11 hours, and work for a maximum of 14 hours in a day, before having to take 10 hours off duty or in the sleeper. He is also limited to working no more than 70 hours in an 8 day period, before he has to take a 34-hour reset.
They contract out to other tractors, however all truckers must abide by the rules, including those that own their own rigs. They’re required to keep logs that are audited at truck inspections along selected roads. Infractions can mean the truck stays where it is at the inspection station until another tractor or driver is brought in. And the trucker gets cited and fined.
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The FedEx driver could have made several scheduled stops in 50 miles to receive packages from other drivers.
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Could have also come in by plane. Packages can arrive at stops long before they are scanned in and shown to have arrived there.
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I kinda doubt the truck went all the way from Nashville to St. Paul. More likely the double bottom was dropped off in Indianapolis and maybe Chicago and then picked up again by someone else. I don’t think anyone drives more than 3 or 400 miles on a daily route and drops at a distribution point.
Packages arrive, are sorted, and yours may have waited for other packages to show up before moving to the Rogers depot.
FedEx does contract trucking companies to haul their freight (I once worked for one of those companies). The reason it took so long though is that, in trucking, there is a lot of sitting and waiting for things to be ready, especially if you’re not dropping-and-hooking, and have to wait for your trailer to be loaded.
There is no telling whether your package was put on a plane, was shipped by a solo driver, or was shipped by a team of two drivers who never sit still very long.
You’re also not including all the time it takes to process freight, what used to be paperwork, in order for your freight to register at the new location.
In relation to the working limits Mountainbike mentioned above, this driver might have had to stop for the night because he reached his daily 10 hour limit, especially if he had already worked 7-9 hours that day before picking up the load that had your package.
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If the package was sorted at a terminal and a plane was committed to flying to Minneapolis immediately despite being severely below capacity any GROUND cargo ready to go would likely be thrown in to ride free. Doing so would often result in eliminating unnecessary handling.
When I have ordered merchandise that is sent via Fed Ex, I get a tracking number and use the number to see the route the package takes from its point of origin until it arrives at my door. It’s interesting to follow the route the package takes.
Some of the routes are interesting. About 7 or 8 years ago I bought something off of eBay from a seller in GA.
According to tracking the package went from GA to TN to TX to AZ to OR to CO, BACK to TN, to TX, and finally to OK.
Wonder why the USPS is in the red…
Seems like a pretty ineffective way of doing things to me… 
OTOH it could still be sitting in GA waiting to fill the rest of that one trailer going directly to OK. 
Yeah, I as kind of stoked when the package hit TX the first time. The odds of my getting it the next day or two were pretty high.
When I checked to see if it was out for delivery I see the package is now in AZ and I started wondering WTH was going on. By the time it hit OR I was in stunned disbelief…
I had a gas tank that traveled around the country. They said by mistake but who knows? I think it started out someplace in the east and should have gone to Minneapolis but ended up somewhere around Washington state before starting its journey back again.
I had a friend fly in to visit me in ND once… her luggage took a longer route. She never did see it again. 
I recently ordered a case of wine which is near impossible to find in the central U.S. Everything was smooth according to tracking until it hit the local Fedex terminal 20 miles away. Then all hxxx broke loose.
It took 7 days from the time it arrived at the terminal for me to get my hands on it and only then because I told them to hold it at the terminal and I would pick it up there myself.
Apparently the Fedex terminal, the Fedex drivers, and the Fedex online support are all on different planets. I was calling Fedex twice a day every day and constantly being promised delivery times that never happened. The terminal would tell me they would hold it and the next day would deny saying any such thing.
Their online support is apparently in Pakistan or India so there seems to be a huge disconnect. It was only sorted out when I managed to get someone in the U.S. corporate offices.
Who knew that Eastern Airlines flew to North Dakota? 
(For those who didn’t live in Eastern’s service area, I will say that that long-defunct airline was notorious for losing luggage. In fact, Saturday Night Live once had a skit titled “The Island of Lost Luggage”, and–of course–Eastern Airlines was the carrier that was mentioned.)
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I DESPISE FedEx, and if I have a choice, I specify that I want my goods shipped via UPS.
I went through a similar circus with a case of misdirected wine, and when I finally tracked it down to a FedEx terminal about 30 miles from my house, I drove there, rather than trusting those clowns to execute a proper delivery on their third try. When I arrived at that terminal, the office staff was passing a take-out menu around so that everyone could choose their lunch of the day. Customer service? What’s that? 
Those [jerks] made me cool my heels for close to 15 minutes before they were able to take their eyes off that menu and actually pay attention to me and the other 3 or 4 customers who were standing there. Then, it took them an additional 20 minutes to locate my package, so between the round-trip drive to their terminal and the ridiculous waiting periods, I had to devote well over 90 minutes to retrieving a package whose delivery they had screwed-up multiple times.
And, that drawn-out adventure was actually less grueling than what I went through as a result of their misdirected attempts to deliver computer equipment, back in 2005.
I thought Eastern was the official Disney airline? Wonder why.
I’m in southern California, and one of our local news channels seems to be owned by Disney. I guess that’s no big surprise, since Disneyland is just a little ways south. It’s a popular destination to spend the day
I ordered a personalized license plate from California DMV. They sent it to an office in Los Angeles instead of near me. It took a year to have it transferred to the right office. I had to have my state representative’s office chase it down. I ordered something from China and the tracking said it was in Los Angeles in five days. It took 10 more days to get to Oakland.