What You Must Know about Shipping Packages

As Christmas nears, there are some things I've learned (the hard way) that I'd like to share with you. Today's lesson concerns mailing packages. I recently needed to ship a repaired laptop overseas to an APO (military) address. You can only use regular mail to ship things to an APO address. Since I didn't feel secure about packaging it properly, I took it to a local pack and ship store.

Now, I know these kinds of places add on fees to pay their overhead, but what happened to me was ridiculous. First of all, they charged me $35 to package it. They wrapped it in many layers of bubble wrap and put it in a larger box. My sister later pointed out that I could have bought a lot of bubble wrap for just a few dollars at Walmart, but I was in a hurry and didn't think of that. (I'm always in a hurry.)

Then, the charge for shipping the package by regular mail was $68. I stood there and told the owner, "that doesn't sound right". But I left it with him anyway. As soon as I got home, I went to usps.com, the postal service website, and entered the dimensions and weight of the box, plus the to and from zip codes. Sure enough, I could have mailed the same package at the post office for $34. They were charging double! I called the pack and ship store and told them I would be right down to retrieve my package and get a refund. The owner was very defensive and pretended he didn't know he was charging me double ("I was just going by what my computer says"), but he knew.

Just for future reference, I called the local UPS Store to find out what they would have charged me, also giving them the dimensions and weight. It turns out they would have packaged it for $12 and mailed it for around $42. A little profit, but not an exorbitant amount.

We can all learn from my mistakes. More Christmas ideas coming this week!