Apartment and condo dwellers: check your lease! You may be paying up to $20 a month for a delivery service, whether you use it or not.
It’s called Fetch. And now, residents say the company is not only failing to deliver packages on time, but that it is also taking a bite out of their wallets.
Micki Hazen of Everett is tired of her packages arriving days late to her apartment building.
“They lose things, they miss their windows, it’s just crazy,” Micki said. “Anything that could go wrong has gone wrong with Fetch. That bad, really that bad.”
And she’s not blaming Amazon, UPS or FedEx — but Fetch instead.
Residents have their packages sent to its facilities in Seattle or Kirkland. They’re given a code, and Fetch’s website promises customers can use their app to “schedule a convenient delivery window same day or any day.”
Micki says that’s just not the case.
“It’s a time suck,” she said. “I’ve spent hours and hours dealing with Fetch.”
UPS delivered one of Micki’s packages to Fetch on Monday, July 18.
Check the app, and it shows the package wasn’t even put into the system until July 22.
“Fetch hadn’t logged it in yet. They told me they were two days behind logging packages,” Micki said.
“Since that last week in March when I moved in, I never got anything the same day, it’s been anywhere between two and eight days later,” said Jason Eckard, a resident of the Parkside Apartments in Redmond.
Jason says he’s far from the only person in the building to go through this. And when he can’t get same day delivery, he says Fetch neuters his Amazon Prime membership.
“I’d love to get $10-$15 dollars back from them, just to know this is a problem,” Jason said. “We know that, ‘We don’t want you to see us as a money suck,’ but you kind of are.”
There’s a reason for businesses like Fetch.
Parkside has 664 units receiving up to 118,000 packages each year. It’s a business model that should meet any apartment manager’s needs.
“They don’t have the space to hold everybody’s packages and then sign it out, they’d have two or three people working nonstop for that,” Jason said.
But when I asked Parkside’s owners about Fetch’s performance, they sent a statement saying, “Fetch has not been a perfect solution and we are exploring others.”
“I just want to know what’s going on,” Jason said. “Why can’t it work?”
Fetch says it’s in 27 markets nationwide. However, it has an F rating with the Better Business Bureau, for failing to respond to 15 complaints and having 133 filed against the company in total.
But there’s more. Micki is concerned about her packages at Fetch’s facilities.
The company says, “We accept and safely store packages.”
In Seattle, they were delivered inside the facility.
However, in Kirkland, we saw many of them outside the building in the blistering heat.
Micki says she’s seen it herself and snapped her own photos.
“I was just appalled,” she said. “I could have walked up and taken any package that I wanted.”
In an email to customers, Fetch apologized for its recent performance, saying, “We know that there have been shipment delays, far too many rescheduled packages, and slow customer support response times. You deserve better from us.”
The company says it’s making an array of changes — hiring new leadership, adding team members, and partnering with a firm to provide supplementary customer support agents.
However, it’s a bit too late for Thrive Communities, the owners of Micki’s apartment building.
In a statement to KIRO 7, the company said, “At this time we have decided to end our contract with Fetch at limited locations where we’ve seen labor shortage impacting the quality of service for our residents.”
“It’s just been a mess that doesn’t sound like it should be that hard,” Micki said. “But apparently it is.”
Fetch adds, “We apologize for any inconvenience the residents have experienced and will make the necessary adjustments to correct these issues as soon as possible.”
The company did not respond to the claims made by Micki and Jason. It also had no comment about the F rating it has with the BBB.
One more note — its apartment managers are forcing residents to pay for Fetch.