I fear my wedding sari is destroyed

Graduate student Nicole Lobo returned to the United States in late August after a year in the UK, shipping 10 boxes of items home to Philadelphia that she expected to arrive within days.

Six weeks later, she's still waiting for the package and fears it's lost and destroyed by UPS as the company struggles to keep up with the influx of packages while facing new customs and tariff rules.

“It was terrible,” says the 28-year-old, who was notified last month that her boxes would be disposed of and she would have to make frantic phone calls and emails to try to prevent the outcome.

It's a challenge many UPS customers have faced since the Trump administration took office in late August. stopped importing packages worth less than $800 into the United States without inspection, taxes or duties..

This decision suddenly resulted in about 4 million packages each day being subject to new, more onerous processing and documentation rules.

As the influx leads to longer processing times and higher, sometimes unexpected, costs across the industry, some UPS customers like Nicole say they fear their packages are getting lost in the queue.

“This is beyond me,” said Janani Mohan, a 29-year-old engineer living in Michigan, who also spent hours on hold and sent repeated emails because a tracking alert listed a box sent by her parents in India as being destined for recycling.

The package included, among other things, her wedding dress, which was also worn by her mother, an heirloom from her grandmother and wedding photographs.

“I literally cried to them on the phone,” she says. “Everything there is very close to my heart.”

Oregon-based Mizuba Tea Co., which has been using UPS to import matcha from Japan for more than a decade, was delayed in processing five shipments worth more than $100,000.

The firm received conflicting notifications about their status, including that the items had been sent for recycling.

“My whole team is basically monitoring the scans,” says Lauren Purvis, who runs the business with her family and is now starting to worry about supplies running out if the uncertainty continues.

“We are simply clear that current import systems are not prepared to handle the sheer volume and paperwork involved.”

Importers typically have 10 days after the goods arrive in the US to provide documentation of the goods, pay duties and other fees in order for the package to reach the recipient.

But rapid changes to tariff rules made by the Trump administration have made it even more difficult to meet customs deadlines, say shipping companies such as FedEx and UPS, which offer customs services and often act as importers of record.

For example, businesses are now responsible for paying duties on any steel or aluminum contained in a product, and in many cases vouch for their country of origin – information that many businesses, let alone their shipping companies, do not know.

“Due to changes in U.S. import regulations, we are seeing many packages unable to clear customs due to missing or incomplete shipment information required for customs clearance,” a UPS spokeswoman said.

While acknowledging longer delivery times, the company said it continues to successfully clear more than 90% of international parcels within a day of arrival.

The spokeswoman said its policy is to contact customers three times before disposing of a package.

But seven people interviewed by the BBC, including several companies responsible for delivering goods, said they had not heard from UPS about problems before they saw the warning that their package would be thrown away.

FedEx, another major player in the industry, said it generally does not destroy packages unless instructed to do so by the shipper.

Nicole, a graduate student, says she was asked to provide more information about her products, which she did promptly in early September.

She didn't hear anything else until she saw the disposal notice in late September. After the BBC inquired about her package, the tracking information was updated for the first time in weeks to say it was “on its way”, raising her hopes.

Likewise, Janani said the company applied last week, after being contacted by the BBC, for more paperwork and its package now appears to have cleared customs.

But for business, chaos has already had real costs.

Swedish candy exporter Swedish Candy Land says more than 700 packages sent via UPS to U.S. customers in the first few weeks of September were delayed.

Co-founder Tobias Johansson says the company switched to FedEx after learning of the problem and is now delivering its shipments without incident, although the process took a few days longer than before.

But the lost packages, some of which were reportedly destroyed, cost the firm about $50,000 in reimbursements, not including the costs it incurred on shipping and brokerage fees.

“It's been a big success for us and we haven't had any answers yet,” Mr Johansson says.

Experts say the ripple effect is being felt throughout the supply chain, even to businesses like Mizuba that were not shipping using the $800 tariff exemption known as de minimis.

“It's being felt across the board,” says Bernie Hart, vice president of business development for logistics and customs company Flexport.

In a call with financial analysts last month, FedEx executives said it had been a “very busy period” for its customers, especially smaller players.

“This is a significant headwind,” said Chief Executive Raj Subramanian, warning that changes in the trading environment will likely result in a loss of $1 billion this year, including $300 million in additional costs as the firm hires staff and faces other costs associated with the new rules.

But John Pickel, vice president for supply chain policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents many shipping companies, worries the problems may get worse before they get better.

Overall trade volumes were lower than usual last month, in part because many businesses shipped goods to the U.S. early to reduce tariffs.

“The prevailing thought has always been that companies will figure it out,” he says. “What we saw was much more complex than anyone expected.”