[bobthepanda]

This is actually a pretty interesting comparison. McDonald’s is franchised and so quality is highly dependent on the franchisee. FedEx is the odd one out in major delivery companies in that their model subcontracts to local companies in a similar fashion with the expected wild variance in quality. UPS is wholly owned and operated as a comparison.

[rezonant]

Interesting, but I contend that even without a franchise model, you still have humans doing the work in the end, and human error and inconsistency varies greatly per human. You might say the bad workers would get fired in a well functioning company, but then if there's a high churn rate, that isn't a guarantee of high quality at that low a level in an organization.

[mindslight]

The problem is that with how these companies are set up, if the humans are doing the work well they're basically doing it in spite of the company. Left to their own judgement, vanishingly few humans are going to (leave a package that's actively leaking oil paint; have a local terminal that can never be reached; leave packages down by the road instead of delivering them; falsely mark packages as delivered and then do it surreptitiously the next day). But the systems that command them highly incentivize such behavior in the name of never-ending "optimization" (aka corporate looting).