Fuck you, Intelcom Express

If you order something and it’s being delivered by Intelcom Express, you’ll never get it.

I’m not sure if it’s some kind of joke or something, but Intelcom Express, or Intelcom Courrier, seems to be trying to break the record for the worst delivery in existence. I had three unfortunate deliveries that went through ICC and I never received any of them. In every case, I had to ask the shipper to resend the item using another delivery service. But I’ll let these reviews make my point for me:

I wasn’t planning to make an article on Intelcom, but I ordered something from Amazon yesterday and once again, these idiots decided to ship it through Intelcom. Why? We’ll never know why. They could use Canada Post, UPS, Fedex, DHL or even Purolator for all I care, but no, they had to use that shitty service that manges to deliver something like 5% of the packages it receive.

The second review on that list describes it perfectly: “trying to do business with this company was the worst shipping experience of my entire life.” Consider yourself lucky, Johnny: trying to do business with Intelcom Courrier was the worst experience of my life, period.

For some reason, Amazon decided to use these guys. Every time I order something on their website, I cross my fingers, hoping I won’t have to deal with this nightmare again. It’s a crapshoot, a 50-50, really. And as soon as you realize Amazon used ICC once again (at this point, it’s too late since your stuff is already shipped), you know you’re fucked and you know your package will disappear to another plane of existence. I mean, just using their tracking services is almost impossible. First, you gotta find it. Good luck:

Do you see a link to track your package? Because I sure don’t. None of these links lead to a tracking service. It’s not even directly on their website. That’s right: you cannot find their tracking service on their website. Instead, you got to be very lucky and get that “one” pop-up that likes to pop up from time to time - you know, whenever it feels like it.

And don’t you dare clicking outside the area of the pop-up or you’ll never see that link to the tracking service ever again until you delete your cookies. Because reasons. Why they couldn’t add a permanent link at the top of their website instead of that “weather” link that links to nothing, I’ll never know.

So anyway, after you click “e-commerce,” which apparently isn’t part of their regular delivery services (you know, e-commerce is such a tiny fraction of deliveries these days that it’s a special category), here’s what you find:

Could it possibly be harder to find? I don’t think so. Don’t you love it when you specifically click a link to track an item and end up having to play a game of “Find Waldo” to get what you want? I mean, who designed this crap, Roger Taillibert?

So anyway, all of this is futile since even if you somehow manage to find everything, here’s what your status update on your tracking will look like:

Wow, what a tremendously useful piece of information to gather! I am so glad to hear my delivery is “optimized.” I mean, is this a joke or something? How the hell did Amazon end up with these guys? I guess they stick true to their motto “Worry-free delivery” because whenever something is shipped through Intelcom Express, you just know you aren’t going to get it. No points worrying about it: you just won’t get it.

It’s hard to explain how terrible their delivery service is. In a way, I think they were totally unprepared to handle the volume coming from Amazon (most of their deliveries before that seems to be specialized documents and pharmaceutical products). I think the owner just saw the big letters “A M A Z O N” and immediately imagined his life as a millionaire. “This is my chance! We are going to be listed on the Toronto Stock Market soon!” he must have thought, before realizing there was no way he could achieve what would be asked of him and correctly handle the volume coming from Amazon.. I mean, just look at this:

UPS delivers 15+ millions packages a day. This company is barely 0.1% the size of UPS. Arguably, Intelcom Express only delivers in Canada, but Canada Post alone delivers 410,000 packages every day and barely anyone uses them (it’s all Fedex/UPS here). And yet these guys seem proud of their “16,000 parcels.” This is just pathetic.

It’s hard to explain why Intelcom Express sucks so bad. Basically, if you see something shipped through Intelcom Express, you’ll never get it. You’re better off reordering the item and crossing your fingers rather than deal with their never-ending “Failure to Deliver.” Once, only once, I tried to solve the problem by calling them. After three failed calls and one voicemail that was never returned, I was somehow able to get a hold of them. After ten minutes of trying to find my tracking number, the lady informed me they could either attempt delivery again (yeah, right) or that I could pick my package at their office which is a good hour and a half away from me. I ended up buying the item at a Best buy.

But rest assured that Intelcom Express has “2,000 satisfied customers:”

I guess if you ship enough packages, eventually you’re going to find people that are going to be satisfied. Intelcom Express claims it shipped over 4,000,000 packages every year, so even if all those “satisfied customers” came from last year, that’s still a 2/4,000, or 0.5% satisfaction rate. Yeah, that seems about right.

Fuck these guys.

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