Parcel Problems

You’d think getting something shipped to you would be easy, but noooo, I just have to be super-picky…

I don’t really like using the commercial shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, etc., especially for packages coming from the States. Their airmail rates are fairly high, and I don’t usually care too much about it arriving quickly. The ground rates are better, but then there’s extra paperwork involved; customs charges wind up being handled through a separate broker for some reason. In any case, the customs charges themselves are annoying, and there’s often an additional customs brokerage charge on top of the actual duty itself. UPS is particularly bad — the last time I received something from them, there was a flat $25 brokerage fee in addition to the duty percentage *and* the initial shipping charge paid to the company that sent it.

Delivering it to the right place can also be tricky. If I get it sent to my home, they’ll almost certainly never actually catch me at home, so they wind up holding it and making vehicle-less me go down to their way-out-of-the-way holding centres to pick it up. Maybe if I’m lucky that day they’ll let it be redirected to the office, or I could have it delivered there in the first place, but then there’s office paperwork added in. And sometimes they won’t allow it, insisting that it can only be sent to the credit card’s billing address.

I would actually prefer that they just send it through regular post office mail, since then I can pick it up at the nearby neighbourhood branch, the customs brokerage fee is only $5 (and often waived completely), and the speed isn’t *that* bad. Unfortunately a lot of places don’t give you that option. The major one that does is Amazon, but now there are whole categories of things that they won’t even ship to Canada (e.g., electronics).

Ah well, time to just deal with the paperwork, I guess…