Good evening gents. A certain issue or more like annoyance has come up for me a number of times in the last few years. Namely the games you have to play to try to ship someone a small item. I really like USPS for this since you can usually play around with the weight and use either first class domestic or priority(non-flat rate) and come out okay for domestic shipping. If you can find the right kinds of boxes. Where I get aggravated is the postal service's refusal to put the regular priority boxes out at the local post offices. At least not around here. One of the handiest is the 7x7 cube size. You have to order the darned things from USPS and they deliver them free but what they really want is for you to use their deceptively limited flat rate priority boxes. Sometimes flat rate makes sense. At other times not so much.
Consider this. Recently I shipped a PIF to Texas. It was a jar of Pecksniff's shave cream. The container is rather flat and it made it into a small, flat rate box with a lot of wasted room on one end. The cost for this was $5.35. Now I am not really complaining. I was happy to send it off to a good home and that price was not horrid considering they gave me the box. I just wondered if a chap could use small boxes that were around five or six inches square and maybe two inches deep and ship first class rather than priority? What I do not like about the priority flat rates is while you can put any weight in them, they have made sure the small boxes are of a size that precludes anything with a height to it. Lets say you wanted to send a bloke a jar of shave cream. Well a two inch tall box wont work. How about a 4x4 to 6x6 size? Walmart sells the latter for 48c. So where do you start hitting a breaking point between weights that makes priority a better option? Conversely, if you are sending out flat items like a shave soap cake and maybe some small sample sized items, then a 5x5x2 inch box would make more sense. Again, you are keeping the box size itself from influencing shipping weight too much. I found a couple of places online for the boxes such as papermart.com and cheepboxes.com. This still doesn't tell me much about shipping ideals. I mean is there a rule of thumb that says when you hit X amount of weight just go to priority or flat rate? Sorry to make such a big deal of this but it is darned aggravating to send a small item to someone in a box half a foot square. And if it is something they are footing the shipping charges for, I try to keep it to a minimum.
Cheers, Todd
Consider this. Recently I shipped a PIF to Texas. It was a jar of Pecksniff's shave cream. The container is rather flat and it made it into a small, flat rate box with a lot of wasted room on one end. The cost for this was $5.35. Now I am not really complaining. I was happy to send it off to a good home and that price was not horrid considering they gave me the box. I just wondered if a chap could use small boxes that were around five or six inches square and maybe two inches deep and ship first class rather than priority? What I do not like about the priority flat rates is while you can put any weight in them, they have made sure the small boxes are of a size that precludes anything with a height to it. Lets say you wanted to send a bloke a jar of shave cream. Well a two inch tall box wont work. How about a 4x4 to 6x6 size? Walmart sells the latter for 48c. So where do you start hitting a breaking point between weights that makes priority a better option? Conversely, if you are sending out flat items like a shave soap cake and maybe some small sample sized items, then a 5x5x2 inch box would make more sense. Again, you are keeping the box size itself from influencing shipping weight too much. I found a couple of places online for the boxes such as papermart.com and cheepboxes.com. This still doesn't tell me much about shipping ideals. I mean is there a rule of thumb that says when you hit X amount of weight just go to priority or flat rate? Sorry to make such a big deal of this but it is darned aggravating to send a small item to someone in a box half a foot square. And if it is something they are footing the shipping charges for, I try to keep it to a minimum.
Cheers, Todd
