Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘UPS Sucks’

I’ve hated UPS for most of my adult life.

Anyone that’s ever lived in an apartment, has had any kind of job that requires they leave the house, or lived in an even remotely ghetto neighborhood, pretty much hates them for the same reasons I do. It’s hard to get your stuff.

The bottom line is this: unless you’re in a mirrored-glass building downtown or in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, UPS doesn’t give a shit about your poor-ass, apartment-dwelling ethnic package. And, unless you’ve rearranged your schedule to get it delivered on the second or third attempt, you’ve had to—on more than one occasion—drive (or take the bus) to the UPS warehouse, on some industrial street you wouldn’t otherwise know existed, to pick up your own damn package.

Frankly, it makes sense UPS doesn’t like ethnic and poor people. If I were them, I wouldn’t like us either. UPS charges three times as much scratch for something the regular-ass post office has been doing for 200 years. There’s a post office in every neighborhood and a mailbox on every street corner. And, the post office (still) delivers on the weekend. Ethnic people are born with the instinct to see through this kind of bullshit, and would never in a million years use UPS given the choice (working there is another story).

Ethnic bargain hunters may not be good business for UPS, but the rich, the corporate, and the exceptionally white are. Those guys roll up into a ball just thinking about the post office, because it’s pretty much exclusively manned by rude, slow-moving ethnic people. (In Los Angeles, mostly impatient black ladies that don’t want to hear your shit.) The post office is inexpensive, and a lot of these types subscribe religiously to the sometimes-very-true notion that “low cost equals low value.” The post office is also the most general-admission place in town. John Q. Homeless can, and often does, stand in line right alongside you.

So imagine the surprised look on my face when I saw the latest series of UPS commercials, featuring an ambiguously ethnic, corporate-looking douchebag drawing pictures on a dry erase board (with a deliciously, and probably unintentionally, ironic choice for background music, a song by The Postal Service band). The craziest part about these commercials is that this douchebag isn’t delivering the packages, he’s the fuckin’ spokesman.

UPS's ambiguously ethnic douchebag spokesman.

I guess that after years of not giving a shit about ethnic people, UPS is finally realizing that brown can do more for them than they can for it.