14 Jun
2003
14 Jun
'03
5:24 a.m.
On Sat, 14 Jun 2003, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
As others have mentioned, Fedex Ground is usually
cheaper.
This is a perennial thread here; and with good reason - a lot of us
recieve items and have occasion to ship Stuff.
I dislike UPS - they've mangled their share of my Stuff, and always seem
to have a whiff of 'tude.
OTOH, I have a FedEx Ground account. It's free, and I just put in the
particulars of whats going where - the system prints out a barcoded label,
and I'm good to go. I have to take the box(es) to the FedEx folk, since
one of the reasons Ground is cheap is that they don't provide pick-up
service - but since FedEx locations are easy to find, this has not been a
problem for me. My account charges my credit card directly for the
shipping costs, and, since eveything's pre-labelled, the Stuff goes right
on the conveyor and that's that.
The Ground Account pages then track all my shipments automatically for
me on one summary page, which is nice if one doea a lot of eBay work -
I'll sometimes have 10 or 12 boxes in transit to various corners of the
planet.
And it don't take half a brain to figure out that it's the job of a
carrier to get your parcel to it's destination - it's *your* job to pack
it so it gets there in the condition you intended it to. I don't see
what's so hard about that. Like Chad, I bubble-wrap and double-box, use
crushed-up newspaper, plastic wrap - I've never had a problem, so far.
YMMV
John