UPS Charges

[Delphinus]

I try to avoid UPS on any inbound-from-U.S. products I've purchased. It's not so bad if you, say, buy something for $500 and then get charged $50 as it's only 10% at that point, but I've been nailed by this brokerage fee when I've bought something for $20. Lesson learned. It's not like they're alone in this practise though. I've had something come by Fedex and I was charged $70 for brokerage. At least with UPS you know you have to pay this fee because you don't get your package if you don't pay. With Fedex the item arrived at my door and a month later an invoice was sent to me. I had no idea what the invoice was for so I threw it out thinking that someone was scamming me. Later I got a second letter with a slightly-less-friendly tone to it (but at least this time they explained better why they were sending Guido).

This brokerage fee is a scam, sure, (just like a service charge for banking or increasing premiums for insurance on a depreciating asset), but, what can you do. They're not going to stop charging it. The problem is that they probably DO tell the people who ship items "Hey this will have a brokerage fee at the other end" but that message never gets carried through to the buyer/receiving end, so it invariably comes as an unpleasant surprise.

What drives me crazy is the fact that if you're not home to receive the package, they try for 3 days to deliver and then say "Ok you have to come to the depot to pick it up on your own time. Oh BTW we're not open weekends, or evenings, haha." There have been times I've just gone to the depot close to closing time and wait for the truck to come in before the driver goes home, in the hopes of being able to get my package. And if you ever decide to have livestock shipped by UPS, for pity's sake take the day off from work - otherwise the livestock gets stuck in the delivery hell of 3 attempts @ 1 attempt per day, that package is gonna be rank at the end of that.

In fact it did happen that I was in a group order for livestock ... actually come to think of it now, it's happened to me a few times .. where the shipment was sent towards the end of the week and the shipper just thought "UPS will deliver this on Saturday." In one case the shipper even PAID extra to have Saturday delivery. I guess it was more of a "haha good luck with that" fee because naturally they did not deliver on Saturday. The packages were stuck in limbo over the weekends and in both cases the frags were complete writeoffs (ended up RTN'ing over the course of a few days). So .. that was another lesson learned, if the seller insists on using UPS - insist on a Monday to Wednesday shipment, otherwise it's just too close to the weekend. Or be prepared to lose the livestock.