Wednesday, UPS and NARVRE

As soon as I got up, I went to the UPS store, to mail the boxes of bottles to Canada. This experience illustrates why I don't like working with UPS. From the web site, it should have cost $110.77. But when I get there with that printed out, he explains that I could get that price if I went to the UPS shipping warehouse directly, but since this is a UPS store, it will cost more -- about $125. Even tho I had told the web site that I would be shipping from a UPS store.

But since we had targetted about $160 for shipping, I figured I could improve the packing and stay within our guidelines, so I suggested that we put one of the boxes inside another UPS box, to give it extra cushioning and safety.

Then he explains that even tho I am paying for extra insurance to cover breakage, and they are accepting the box that if it breaks at the other end, they will disallow the breakage, since it is a customer pack, and they will just say it was badly packed, not their fault, no insurance.

But if we put it in a slightly bigger box, that makes the box exceed a limit in size, and the price jumps to $182 for shipping.

However, he could take the box, and repack it so that everything was well protected. That would cost more for the box and the packing, but be able to fit in a smaller box and get under the size limit. I figure I can trade off the better box and packing for the cost in shipping, and agree.

He goes off, and comes back. Now it's still $182 for the shipping, but with $28 for the box and shipping, so its over $200. So we go from $110 on the web to over $210 at the store. They just ratchet the price up and up given any opportunity.

When Mom got up, we went to the NARVRE meeting. A pleasant lunch, with a bunch of retired railroad workers.

Then downtown for Mom to get her new (to her) wedding ring. She had it resized from its original 6.5 down to a 5.0. To my way of thinking it still looked a bit large, but they said to try it for a little while.

Stopped to get Mom's refilled prescriptions, then home to walk Blue around the block.

Then there was another drawer of inventory to go thru. Turned out not to be too bad.