Sold a framed picture on Ebay. I bought a box from U-Haul to ship the picture, it is marked as 37" long, that is what I put in the listing. The picture sold and I was paid. I printed a shipping label and dropped it off at my local post office. 2 days later the mailman brought the box back to me, it was stamped insufficient postage. Almost $42 apparently is not enough to send an 8 pound package to Connecticut. I took it back to the post office to find out what went wrong. The gal pulled out a tape measure and said the box is just over 37" long, I need to pay for a package 38" long. I figured the extra inch should add a couple dollars at most. Nope, $8.13. After Ebay fees and a few other expenses, I made $7 on an item that sold for $30.
For the next time:
(Best. Domain Name. Ever.)
Dying to make an inappropriate joke here! But won’t…
That is an OLD OLD game played by the PO.
Back in the covered wagon days, when Mr VOW was Sgt VOW and we were engaged to marry, I would send him “goodie boxes.” I won’t go into detail over SAM and PAL and the shipping rules carved in stone, on tablets at the same time as the Ten Commandments.
I bought the effing cardboard box at the freakin’ Post Office. The sample stuck to the wall behind the clerks had the dimensions printed on it: 12"×12"×12".
I filled the box, brought it back to the PO. The clerk pulls out his tape measure. Length plus girth (or some such nonsense) and it wasONE INCH over the max.
If you go by the printed dimensions of the box stuck to the wall, the box should have been right on the money.
I argued. It was still no-go.
Fifty years later, I’m STILL pissed off!
~VOW
“WeLL, 12x12x12 is tHe iNsIdE DiMenSiOns…”
I’ve been around and around with them about this crap too. Shipping was never cheap, but over the last few years it seems to have really blown up in price.
Three decades ago, I worked part time as a UPS package auditor. My job was to crawl around the distribution center (yes, I walked on the belts, even though I wasn’t supposed to) and measured the length and girth of packages with a little chain. Any package that exceeded the combined maximum got an additional over-size charge…if it hadn’t already been charged as over-sized. We were basically looking for over-sized packages missed by the clerks at the package shipping locations. The magic measuring chains were available to the shippers, but a lot of them just eyeballed the packages.
It was a bad night if we didn’t have several hundred dollars in new charges. Sometimes we’d hit one out of the park when a shipper had huge shipments of identical packages that were all just slightly over the maximum dimensions.
No, our pay was not based on how much additional revenue we generated. But I wish it had been.
My mother sent me a Christmas box when I was in Vietnam. She also sent me a letter saying that when she took it to the PO, it was slightly too large for PAL. Since she didn’t feel like going home and reboxing it, she sent it SAM. Three months later it arrived, containing a cake covered in mold, a bag of cookies, also covered in mold, and a package of reindeer sausage that went directly into the garbage can. To add insult to injury, she had bought me a record album by Bobby Gentry, telling me the guy in the store said “It’s the latest thing!” It followed the sausage.
I wonder if UPS could use cameras nowadays to spot oversize packages as they move down the conveyor belt.
I don’t know if they even care anymore. The measuring chain we used was like a long keychain or light fixture pull. You’d go around the package girth, pinch the chain at that point, and then continue from that point to measure the length. If the package went beyond the little bell-shaped marker on the chain…ding! ding! ding! Over-size charge! If it went beyond the length of the chain entirely, I believe that it was too big to be shipped at all. (I may be misremembering.)
If the package went over the chain entirely, the box was dropped from an airplane at the coast, where someone would strap pontoons on it then throw it in the ocean.
~VOW
There is an entire industry of devices to measure what shipping and freight companies call dimensional weight. Here are some from one manufacturer:
Thanks. That’s about what I imagined. Their system looks like it can be installed over a conveyer belt and automatically measure package dimensions as they move down the line.
Up until earlier this year the USPS would ship a big Priority Mail triangular box with our round tube inside for about $8. Now for whatever reason they decided to make shipping tubes much more expensive. So we started using UPS for tubes.
There are also much larger ceiling-mounted dimensioning instruments for measuring pallets, crates and other freight.
Huh.
I always assumed that they’d ship anything for a fixed $3.14 per pound.
TIL …
By the time you’re (the generic you, not you specifically) are done with postage and shipping and listing and packing and pain in the a$$ing, it’s not worth selling on eBay, unless the sold item fits in a USPS standard Priority Mail box.
At the USPS, we use either a pair of laser dimensioners or scanner arrays, depending on the sorting system. Also, these days the pricing on our pre-fab boxes is set, and “if it fits, it ships” (don’t try taping two boxes together, though; the guarantee doesn’t cover that).
Something about making a quick $16 maybe? 