FedEx is offering $5 off web orders to enable Flash | Hacker News Reader

FedEx is offering $5 off web orders to enable Flash

fedex.com

116 pointsdonjh66 comments

Seems like a misleading title to me. I read it as saying that you have a choice of ordering without Flash at a higher price. In fact, Flash is a straight requirement no matter what, and they're offering a code for $5 off in an attempt to compensate people for the hassle of installing it.

So really, you're getting $5 off for starting the process without Flash. If you already have Flash installed, you'll never see this page and never get the discount code.

Obviously they should stop requiring Flash, but the title doesn't seem to accurately describe things.

Wish I had a highlight reel of the meetings that led to this decision. The shouting, the red faces, the eye rolling, the gigantic exhalations lel.

    If you are using Chrome on a desktop or laptop:

    Open a new tab in your Chrome browser.
    Type “chrome:plugins” in your URL address field.
    Under Adobe Flash Player click the checkbox next to Always allowed to run.

If doing this gets your box hacked, are they providing PC repair services?

Also, this method no longer works either since they dropped the "chrome://plugins" page in Chrome 57.

Takes the term "flash sale" to another level.

Ha. No thanks. If I go to use FedEx and flash is required I'm just going to use a different carrier.

They are just delaying the inevitable. I bet there's some higher-ups at FedEx who still like flash and refuse to give it up.

> I bet there's some higher-ups at FedEx who still like flash and refuse to give it up.

I suspect this is just a delaying action - a vain attempt to retain some of their web order volume - while they frantically write the replacement for their Flash component.

Yeah, it basically seems like an "oh shit, we're sorry our site is so ancient, here, have this coupon code so you save some money and don't jump ship instead".

Seems like a reasonable stopgap as long as they're working on fixing it.

Then again, Flash has been deprecated for almost 10 years already. When the original iPhone famously came out with a no Flash policy back in 2007, the technical community knew that it was a dead format. Even granting the general corporate mindset of dragging your feet there has been plenty of time to source a replacement for Flash in your ecosystem.

I bet all that hindsight really helps you sound like some sort of visionary. Flash was alive and well long after the introduction of the iPhone. Ignoring the fact it was hardly available internationally, and only on a single carrier in the United States. Nerds hated Flash, but it was still seen as a somewhat acceptable and expected technology to come across.

This is for their print publishing places called FedEx Office. A lot of these places used to be Kinkos locations before they acquired them. They use flash to let you preview your print jobs before sending them off. Moving off flash is non-trivial for them.

Probably just didn't think it would be an issue and refused to fund the site migration. Which is strange, what have they been doing for mobile? Turns out, when people switch that shit off in default no one's going to turn it back on.

They're mobile site is despicable. UPS has a decent mobile site and very decent (even good) app. Brown shirts are winning.

From what I hear, shipping is tough these days since Amazon delivers the small stuff and tasks big items to the shipping companies. The margin is in lots of small packages, it's tough to make money from a truck that is only delivering big stuff.

Point being, winning is relative.

Even if they offered me $100, I wouldn't enable Flash. I'm guessing they're hard at work writing their Flash component into HTML/JS.

100 $ is a lot of money...you can probably handle flash just for FedEx I bet.

Though you're probably right. They'll have an updated version asap.

Literally not worth the time or loss in trust. I don't use anything closed source on most of my machines (without proper sandingboxing).

The main machine I have with closed source software gets only one credit card, with a low limit and that is for steam.

I would be setting up VM for this. More likely I would just call and get what I need or switch carriers.

You know credit cards have 0 liability so it actually wouldnt matter if it had high limit? I never got the "i wont give my card" argument.

That is why I used one credit card on the machine.

I didn't use a second. I don't want to deal with the hassle. I don't want to have someone steal tiny amounts of money.

Perhaps, I have other things than financials that are sensitive on my machines.

$100 would be enough for me to clone a virtual machine, at least.

I live less than 2 miles from a FedEx ground hub. I would rather walk the 30 minutes in both directions before enabling Flash for FedEx. WTF are they thinking? Pay that money to a developer to fix the problem instead of to your customers to limp along for a few more months.

They probably went with the cheap developer, who promised it to be done by Christmas... now they hired a different agency to do it, meanwhile...

You think? It's been years now. Many years. And they still depend on some rusty flash applet?

Cheaper than re-engineering their enterprise web facing app I guess. Sad.

I'm sure they're just resentful that someone is "forcing them" to rewrite what they perceive to be a fully-functional product "for no reason". And to be fair, that sentiment is by no means rare; that's why there are still COBOL programmers, after all, and to a lesser extent, "enterprise" OS distributions.

Take into consideration that while the bare functionality of Flash has been "replaced" by HTML 5, there is nothing that really comes close to actually replacing Flash the IDE, especially not in a way that Flash developers find amenable. I've been working with a group to convert a Flash game to HTML 5, and, to put it lightly, it's a massive mess. There is currently no clear migration path. The market is really lacking there.

Even Adobe has given up on pretending like Flash is a solution for applications now; the IDE has been renamed "Animate".

In any case, FedEx is pitting itself against Google and the web community in a way I doubt they really understand. Whichever upper-mid-level manager green-lighted this is pretty naive.

I am sure their ledgers say its cheaper, but is losing customers ever actually cheaper?

There are plenty of people on machines without good flash support, various mobile devices and odd browsers. There are tech savvy people who know flash is an entry vector for viruses. Then there are people who just can't figure out how to install it.

5 years ago I would have believed the loss in that column of the ledge would be smaller than rewriting an app. Today, recreating the app should be cheaper than ever and more people have already moved on from flash. 5 years from now this will be example of some kind, I think it will be an example of how not to hold onto dying tech.

They're taking $5 per purchase out of their budget, instead of spending $5 per purchase to fix the problem.

I wonder if this is a color of money thing. Are the management team attributing that $5 to IT to paint them as being an even bigger cost center and shame them into catching up with to 10's? I can't wrap my head around this.

FedEx is the only courier service I've ever had problems with (once they didn't deliver for three days in a row saying there was nobody home: there were five of us in the house those days and we were looking out for the delivery, when they eventually told me on the phone that the delivery would arrive by X time, it arrived 4 hours after X... They also tried to charge me import duty for an item that cost less than threshold and more recently they tried to get me to pay VAT on a VAT-exempt item) and I don't use them unless I have absolutely no other choice. This is just another in a long list of turnoffs for me for this shitty company.

No other courier has ever done any of these things.

I've had similar problems, I don't hold them in the high regard that I used to. This is anecdotal but I think when they merged with Kinkos the service faltered a bit. I also always thought this was an odd match culturally - The Kinkos experience has always felt like the epitome of slow and inefficient to me while Fed Ex has as their official slogan 'the world on time."

I bet they'd save a bunch of money if they added a flash based cat video instead of a coupon.

Users would enable flash to watch the video, because that's what users do, and then it'll be enabled for the rest of checkout.

I encountered that last night when trying to get something printed. Nope. My money went to a different printer.

I'd be really curious to see some numbers on how successful this has been for them.

Yea I would be curious as well. I'm sure this was the direct result of customer service receiving high call volumes on the same issue. If you look at their web app that relies on flash, its a real behemoth to rebuild so this credit for the end user annoyance probably seemed like an obvious long term bandage.

The instructions should at least limit the "always allow" to the fedex sites. Pretty bad advice to always allow globally.

This is basically the chain of events that led to my mother disabling adblock globally (as instructed by a tv channel "on demand" website), and subsequently got an ad popup for "there's a virus on your computer" and so on and so forth.

Cue a day of my weekend spent fixing a dead laptop.

and people wonder why iOS doesn't have an option to let you side load apps, even after changing a setting. Or why Android warns you harshly on every boot when you install an external CA, etc.

My experience with FedEx's technology stack is minimal, but I can tell you that all publicly exposed FedEx technology (ie. apis, etc) confirm without a shadow of a doubt that FedEx is not a technology company and they should leave the evolution of the web to others.

I was amazed that MSNBC wanted me to enable flash to watch a video yesterday.

I would think AWS and Azure would have cleaned up grabbing all those transcoding dollars by now. It's not like the impending death of flash was a surprise to anyone.

This makes me think about a related issue I've encountered at work: remote check deposit software from banks (think a small scanner designed for businesses to deposit multiple checks, not a smartphone app) is typically a browser-based Java applet. Already the latest Chrome and Firefox straight up won't let you use this. I haven't seen any bank that uses something other than Java applets for remote deposit, and I don't have a clue if any of them are working on replacing it.

If anyone by chance knows a bank with remote deposit software that isn't Java in the browser, I would love to know about it.

Has a company ever gone this route before?

Companies used to require IE a lot back in the late 90s and early 00s, if that counts.

Definitely. My company has several vendors that require us to use IE and Silverlight to access their products. It's been a pain for us in IT to figure out how to support those vendor's products while still maintaining security.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Silverlight, cries

I had to install it for a customer yesterday. I actually thought it had been retired...

I mean actually paying or giving discounts to users to install such a notorious piece of software, like Flash.

I believe that because of all of the vulnerabilities in the Adobe Flash products, people should think of their computer's security first and give FedEx the preverbal virtual finger, and force them to recode their software to use html5 video instead. It is becoming the new standard and is (currently) safer than risking the vulnerabilities in Flash.

I've often said things like, "Not even if you paid me," but the truth is that rarely are you offered money like this.

Not even for $5.

Is there a portable way to create something like FedEx label in browser without flash? If there is, how hard would it be to make something like that - on the order of writing a new 2d graphics library from scratch? Very creatively use an existing an one? Just use an existing library and any moderately competent developer could do it?

Wow, Flash is worth that much to them. I wonder what the functionality is that's worth that much and what it would cost to change what ever existing workplace culture, upskilling & what have you. It might be a great investment on their behalf.

Also bad, they only mention support for 2 browsers, Chrome and Safari.

I sincerely hope that FedEx fails. I once bought the book "FreeBSD Kernel Internals" from informit. They sent it through FedEx. I payed the shipping costs in the informit site, as standard procedure. The book passed through customs fine, then FedEx hold it and told me they would not deliver the book unless i paid them 50EUR.

This is their current and common practice here in Portugal. Fsck them.

If it makes you feel any better UPS in France does that to me all the time. It isn't the carriers -- it's the protectionist tax schemes of the EU. I once had a replacement wheel for a kid's stroller sent to me in France from the US. The wheel cost $20, and I had to pay $35 in import duties -- despite that part being unavailable anywhere outside of the US.

Blame the government, not FedEx.

If you live in France, it seems that UPS made you pay abusively the custom duties (not due if the value of the package is below 150€). You should only have paid for the VAT, which tops at 20%. http://www.douane.gouv.fr/articles/a10753-achats-a-distance-...

Also, I got a delivery by UPS in France once, and they made me pay the custom duties (which was fine, for a parcel valued at 400€), but also added their own «paperwork fees» that were as high as the custom duties, and were pretty much unexpected.

FedEx (and apparently UPS) do this without any type of warning, they are probably exploiting some loophole in the law to be able to do it. They can't expect happy reactions from their customers. I blame them for doing it without proper communication and also anyone that plays along with them without providing proper alternatives after knowing that they do this kind of stuff.

That is not the way business should be done. There should be a social responsibility part in every company. Extorting money goes against that.

Are you sure the money actually goes to Fedex? From the description it looks like the money goes to customs, which is a government agency. In that case, it's not clear why you're angry with Fedex, which pretty much has no choice but to charge whatever the government tell them to charge.

I called customs, talked to them, they don't apply fees to educational books. They released it free of charge but only to be picked by the entity with the paper for it. FedEx had that paper and they would only pick it up with 50EUR on their pockets. I argued that i could pick it up from customs myself and pay whatever taxes if i had the paper in my name instead. They said the 50EUR charge would be for the pickup paper and not for the package itself, that is why it was not charged by the sender. They threatened that if the money was not paid the package would return to sender (i have these emails and could send them to you if you want).

This story is not only mine but the same story for all the individuals who ordered stuff through FedEx that i have contacted here.

Wow that looks like extremely shady practice.

> I sincerely hope that FedEx fails...

Yikes. You had a bad experience once with a company that's pretty reputable. Now you hope thousands of people lose their jobs and investors lose their money. This seems disproportionate, to say the least!

This is their current and common practice. When it happened I collected a few other stories from individuals who sent stuff with them. This is common.

Taking your argument one notch up: I hope and believe that this kind of coercion should be discouraged and that a company that insists on doing this must fail. Society cannot put value in these behaviors in any way (paying them 50EUR is giving them value). If you work at a company that mistreats their customers by extorting money from them then it would be better if you start looking for another job (better as in: better for us all). We have to work towards a system/society where the place we work should be a choice and not a last resort thing that our survival depends uppon (slavery). That is the base pillar of the free market ideology or any other ideology worthy of discussion (put in your favorite *ism here).

If you are an investor that is willingly and knowingly putting money in a company that behaves like that and expect to get your profit back because of these tactics then you should lose your money. We cannot work based on extortion or forceful positions.

These are just my opinions. They don't take away the fact that FedEx is acting improperly.

Same here in El Salvador, retained my package and after not notifying (got an ISP log of missed/entry calls and no emails) wanted to charge me 40USD aside of the usual "other charges" 50USD.

Extorsion. They cannot expect sympathy or good will if they do this with their customers. No warnings, just plain money grabbing or else your order is sent back to the sender. :(

>passed through customs

Your vendor selected to bill the duties and taxes to you.

Then why did FedEx explicitly told me that the 50EUR was the charge for the paper to pick it up and not for the package itself ? Why did the customs told me that there was no charge for books and that anyone with the paper for the package could pick it up free of charge ?

If we want to be really specific:

By FedEx i mean "Rangel Expresso SA" (www.rangel.pt or www.fedex.com/pt) which is their representation (Global Service Participant (GSP)) here in Portugal.

By customs i mean airport customs (the ones i contacted), not the portuguese state customs. I don't know how they evaluated the package, they probably didn't even knew about it (due to lack of staff or other stuff...).

The chrome:plugins page was removed in Chrome 57. Even their instructions are outdated.

> ...please update your browser using the simple steps provided below.

Yeah, like enabling flash is an update. Good move, Fedex.

ROFL

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