I work for UPS and have personally handled over three million packages in the 5 1/2 years I've worked for the company. Most of the ridicule and slander directed towards UPS as a whole is undeserved, but some of it unfortunately is well-deserved. People have no idea what goes on behind the scenes at a UPS hub. My building isn't one of the bigger hubs, but we still handle around 1.5 million packages a week.
I see maybe half a dozen to a dozen damaged packages a night out of the 8000-1000 packages that come though my area on a shift. Many of those damaged packages are due to improper packaging. It seems like some people think their packages can just be thrown together with whatever packing materials they have sitting around, even if the boxes have been used repeatedly already and many people pay no attention to how much weight the box can actually handle. Some items do get handled roughly by people or machinery, but many of our employees are college students making very little money. Our starting wage has gone up $.50 in the last 20 years. I'm not making excuses for people who are careless, but you get what you pay for. Would you want to pay more for shipping so we could get paid a fair starting wage? I didn't think so.
As for slamming the company as a whole, we've got over 300,000 union employees (the union is part of the problem) who handle packages on a daily basis. Some of them are bad eggs, and some delivery areas handle packages worse than others, just like some areas get worse USPS or FedEx service than others. Slandering the entire company for a bad package or two is just utter foolishness and ignorance. We have a lot of competition and wouldn't have gotten to be the largest package shipping company, and wouldn't remain the largest if we weren't doing a very good job overall.
FWIW I do see quite a few packages come through every week containing flashlights from Dorcy, Streamlight, and BrightGuy, among others. I would say I'm extra careful with those packages, but I try to treat every package with care.
-Keith