Not that big of a deal for me. I have different equipment vendors and some use FedEX as their primary and some use UPS. I know both of my "usual" drivers and actually used to go to school with my current FedEx guy. Both of them have hubs with pick-up/drop-off centers within about 5-7 mins of my house, plus a UPS store about five minutes away and the ability to drop-off FedEx at Office Depot in the same area.
I will say that historically, though, I have had more problems with FedEx over the years. The two biggest snafu's were leaving one of my Betacam's that had been sent for repair on my front porch while I was out of town(partially the vendors fault too, because they did not ship it back to the address I wanted so it would be safe) and "losing" another brand new Betacam being shipped to me from a dealer. That one took the cake, because there were three boxes in the shipment and only one made it. I call them and they try the ole "are you sure it was shipped with us?", after I had already given them the tracking numbers. After about a day or two of them not being able to find it, I told them the value. It was found in less than two hours. In the corner of one of their warehouses. My gut said someone was planning on stealing it.
And as others have said, when B&H moved their whatehouse to NJ, shipping went to crap. I have never had shipping issues with B&H until they moved this past summer. They missed their delivery deadline for a piece of gear I needed for a shoot(I had paid for overnight). Needless to say, they heard about that and I refused the shipment when it finally arrived, so they had to eat the overnight shipping charge to me(which actually took me calling and telling them that I would not pay it since they missed the shipping deadline) and the return back to them. They missed another delivery deadline a few weeks after that one, as well(although it was not a time critical delivery, it was free ground shipping), but nevertheless it was late, then a duplicate item shows up a day after the original. And it was actually an ordeal trying to explain it to them and return it. The CSR eventually thanked me for doing the honest/right thing, but it took 20+ minutes to do it. Things have gotten a little better, but many times this past year, their order and ship times have gone beyond their normal, where you usually place an order before the afternoon cut-off and it ships that day, it went into an additional 1-2 days before they said in-stock items would ship.
As far as Amazon, some of the stuff I ordered around Christmas was delivered by "their" guys. I live within a "prime now" area, but I still haven't tried it out, yet. I also talked to a FedEx driver a few months ago about Amazon's impending internal delivery and logistics system and he said, "Bring it on". Lol.
