Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 18:55:00 -0500
Reply-To: John Rodgers <j_rodgers@CHARTER.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: John Rodgers <j_rodgers@CHARTER.NET>
Subject: Re: Canadians beware! UPS are a bunch of crooks [adr]
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My experience followed Ron's.
I had a production porcelain studio in Alaska for many years and shipped our
north country porcelain figurines that we made all down into Canada. We were
told my the buyers (we only sold to other businesses engaged in tourism trade
and art collectibles) To ship only by Air Mail. Any other means was both to
costly and to slow. Costly with all the tariffs, brokerage fees, and customs
fees. Slow because of the conduct of the operations of customs, and brokers. So,
airmail it was. Only had one problem ever with the Air Mail method, and in that
case we simply decided to eat it, given our success rate.
Only drawback was... and this has probably changed over the years .... we could
not insure our shipments going in by Air Mail. But we never had but one problem
of significance in ten years.
John Rodgers
88 GL Driver
The Bus Depot wrote:
> > Anyway, just a thought. Sounds like your shipper might have used
> > 2 or 3-day air?
>
> UPS includes the brokerage fee in their expedited or express service to
> Canada, but not in the standard service. So if it had been sent via 2 or 3
> day air, there would have been no brokerage fee collected C.O.D. at all.
> This is why, if you look at UPS's standard via expedited rates to Canada,
> you often find that the latter is 5 or 6 times the price and really doesn't
> even get the package there much faster. Much of the price difference is the
> brokerage fee. UPS's rate chart and literature do not make this very clear,
> in my opinion. Furthermore, I have had just about zero luck trying to get
> UPS to estimate in advance how much the brokerage fee will be on standard
> shipments. It seems a bit unreasonable for you to be expected to pay a large
> fee C.O.D. without being able to find out up front about how much it will
> be.
>
> This is why we ship US Air Mail to Canada whenever possible. No brokerage
> fees, reasonable rates, reasonably fast service, and generally less breakage
> of fragile items as well. The only drawback is that it is not trackable.
> This can be a hassle, as the package must be missing for at least 30 days
> before the post office will consider it lost and initiate an insurance
> claim. Fortunately, it is a very rare problem; we get only one or two loss
> claims a year on airmail to Canada, out of several packages shipped each day
> (although late delivery is more common, as even airmail shipments travel via
> Canadian surface mail from the border on).
>
> - Ron Salmon
> The Bus Depot, Inc.
> (215) 234-VWVW
> www.busdepot.com
>
> _____________________________________________
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