So I guess there’s a bit of a premium for that convenience. I just went to FedEx and spent more to send something three-day than I would’ve spent at the post office for overnight service. Sigh…
Other Monday stuff:
- You’ll no doubt be relieved to know that I’m more or less over the serious funk that you didn’t know I was in yesterday.
- My extremely important vacation is now once again in the hands of the nice folks at Canadian immigration. Long story. Don’t ask.
- On the plus side, my AppleTV has also recovered from the serious funk it was apparently in yesterday, and I finished a major administrative task at work today.
Time for some Hawaii Five-O…
UPS and FedEx Ground actually are competitive with Postal Service rates… if you’re a business that does a lot of shipping, and can qualify for their volume discount. As you’ve discovered, they’ve basically decided not to compete with the Postal Service for the retail shipping market.
At least you didn’t try to ship UPS via the “UPS Store”. If you did, you’d have paid the (higher than Parcel Post) UPS rate plus a markup charged by the local store. A “UPS Store” is basically a franchise that has no special downstream rates with UPS, so you pay whatever UPS’s retail rate is *plus* a hefty markup. FedEx manages to charge their normal retail rate with no extra markup if you go to a FedEx Office store. Why anyone without a volume discount would ship UPS is beyond me.
(I know all this because I did a fair bit of selling stuff on eBay once, so I’ve had the opportunity to compare on shipping.)