The article is using the terms "shipping limits" and "pickup limits" interchangeably, which is very misleading.
> I would love to try this one day as long as the Benny Hill song can play in the background as I make trips from my van into a retail UPS store.
Please don't do this, or even joke about it.
There are 26 UPS stores in San Francisco for example. 10 packages at each location per person is hardly going to raise red flags. Use multiple people and add in FedEx and you could probably cover their 3k package backlog in one day. It's not going to cheap or scalable, but you can bet some people are going that route.
Edit: Can someone please explain my error here? This comment [1] (as well as the immediately surrounding thread) indicates the limit applies to a business account that pays lower rates, and you have the unlimited right to ship on a non-business account that pays higher rates. Thus, the limit is really just a limit on the discounted rate. Which is equivalent to a price increase. Which is totally unsurprising and dog-bites-man for a case of high demand and difficulty increasing capacity. Thus, no longer newsworthy.
So where's my error, really?
You can't just start handing out business credit cards to everyone you send to the store, the alternative is to ask employees to pay out of pocket and pinky swear to reimburse them.
Then there's the question of liability. If your business account shipped something, any questions of liability are clear cut and easy to deal with. If a random employee shipped something, who's liable for any issues?
And how about efficiency? Not only are you paying a reduced rate with a business account, but the provider comes and picks up your packages from you on a regular basis. If instead of putting things in the right place and answering the door when the UPS driver comes by, now you're paying however many employees to pick up a bunch of packages, drive over to the closest location, and wait in line. I don't know what the lines are like at UPS right now, but I do know that the USPS lines around me are about 45-60 minutes depending on the time of day. Not to mention that line starts outside in the cold.
And that's all assuming your employee brings 20 packages to the clerk and has no problems shipping them all in the same transaction.
Which means it's possible that your employee(s) didn't do their normal job, got frustrated and cold and risked infection standing in line instead, you paid a premium to do so, and some of your packages didn't get shipped regardless.
Uhh, fwiw, if you tell an employee you'll reimburse them for something they do for your business, it's got a little bit more heft in a court than a "pinky swear."
My post was to point out the absurdity of the claim that a business account with UPS/FedEx is nothing more than a discount. The part you quoted is a joke, and is not to be taken as legal advice. I am not a lawyer, and also IANAL.
Like, you could complain that the reimbursement process is a tedious paperwork-generator, maybe, if you think your other objections aren't enough already?
In good faith I will refrain from joking about expense reports in the future.
I did not intend to cause offense, I just saw room for a joke I thought would lighten the mood of the post a bit by making it seem more childish. I'm not trying to demean people who file expense reports or something.
You don't play stupid games with a critical part of your business operations.
If anything it just stresses the need for businesses to have more contingency plans and supplier/partner depth. Yup, it's not as cheap as winging it with a sole provider for the best deal you can get but you also won't be in a situation where you are screwed at a critical point in your business calendar.
Business operations - so much fun!
Given that shipping can be a significant price component for multiple types of e-commerce, transparency on when they can issue their final "get it by Christmas" sales with their standard/deterministic pricing structure.
Not really, you just keep raising prices per day until it gets to the rate you want. If you want more packages lower the price.
I have no idea why you think something that has been done since the foundation of capitalism is somehow completely foreign or impossible to compute or experiment with. Unlike in an economics class companies will never solve the two equations to perfectly maximize the profit, it's more of a range and they're hoping to get close enough. That's a much more realistic approach that has historically worked.
Now, pandemic hits and drives a lot of unexpected, probably just this year, traffic into parcel shipping that would have otherwise been freight to stores and passenger car to homes and there's not enough capacity.
There's not as much price shaping they can do without being in violation of their contract. In a lot of cases, they know they need these big shippers next year as well, so they can't entirely burn them this year even if they were willing to litigate the contract.
A second price auction market for available capacity could allow the market to adapt fast and transparently to available capacity.
I suppose that we could ship as much as we wanted paying over-the-counter full-retail rates, just like anyone else could.
In contrast to the retailers stories in the article, these limits were not a surprise to us. We’ve been planning for months to accommodate this and I think our main carrier (UPS) did a great job of communicating, even as things were somewhat being defined.
Dropping off at a depot is not really how this bit of the industry works – the courier collects from the distribution centre in almost every case.
The issues with doing your own drop offs include: finding a new courier, booking, figuring out a collection time which then impacts your shipping estimate cut-off time, and paying for this whole service.
In terms of price, you're going from a high volume commodity service at typically a crazy low price for courier shipping (for what it is), to adding a new additional short-term, lower volume or unproven volume, from one of the smaller providers who aren't operating at Fedex/UPS scale. I could imagine this doubling shipping costs, which might be untenable for many ecommerce businesses.
In terms of the actual logistics, it's a challenge, plus typically this would be automated – your software will do this all for you. Now your software needs to book and pre-advise a new provider? And track through them? But also track through the original one?
For most businesses it's probably impractical to implement this, and for most that could they probably have contracts with the couriers that mean they won't be hit by this or they do their own deliveries. I think the space in the middle is a pretty small subset of companies.
I am aware of this. The posted article is referencing merchants with 3000 shipments to send out, which is not insane scale. If FedEx wouldn't pick those up at your door, it is possible to get those shipped out still. Obviously, yes, you may need some new logistics coordination, and it will be more expensive, and yes, it could make a lot of business margin's no longer work. I am definitely not saying that I agree with any action that FedEx/UPS is alleged to be taking here (especially without reasonable notice).
But that is not the same thing as "FedEx is refusing to let us ship more than X boxes per day". And it's a distinction that the article should get right.
It would save so much time.
You'll have a madhouse at those depots if every shipper starts individually hauling in all of their (unusually high number of) packages.