[pct-l] Fwd: UPS vs USPS

[Carl Siechert]

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 5:33 AM, David Margavage <davidmargavage at gmail.com>wrote:

> GEEEZ, Everyone is so dam skeptical.  I know Companies that use the free
> USPS boxes to ship NUT & BOLTS.  And there freak'n heavy! I was
>
My company is one of those; we sell tools and accessories for metalworking
hobbyists, and it's not uncommon for us to get 20-25 pounds of iron into a
Priority Mail Flat Rate Box.

We ship about 400 packages per week--about a quarter of them by USPS and the
rest by UPS. If price is your only consideration, you have to compare each
time. The rate structures for both outfits are inscrutable and it's hard to
know without looking them up which will be less expensive for a particular
source/destination location pair, weight, and service (size is also a factor
sometimes). Typical backpack resupply packages of 10-20 pounds are in the
area where the two are most competitive (for lighter packages, USPS is
generally cheaper, and UPS is usually cheaper for heavier packages)--so you
really must look it up.

Of course, price isn't (or shouldn't be) the only consideration. UPS
provides guaranteed delivery times and tracking on all packages. USPS
provides neither, except on Express Mail. (The "tracking" number that you
can use on Priority Mail or Parcel Post is actually used only for Delivery
Confirmation. Although it sometimes gets scanned during a package's journey,
which can give you a clue as to where the package is, USPS is under no
obligation to scan it anywhere except at delivery, and the interim scans are
actually pretty useless for predicting when a package will arrive or in
locating a lost package.) Similarly, there's no service guarantee for
Priority Mail. In our experience, about half of the PM packages we mail
throughout the country arrive in three days or less (sometimes faster than
UPS), and something like 98% make it in a week or less. Lost packages are
very very rare, but it's not uncommon that some packages take two weeks to
deliver. By contrast, UPS delivers about 99% on exactly the day they say
they will. (Depending on where you're shipping from/to within the
continental US, the guaranteed delivery time for UPS Ground is 1-5 business
days.)