10:43 – We’ve had rain or a high likelihood of rain nearly every day for more than a month. Our total for June was over 11 inches (28 cm), which is three times normal. Even on days that there’s no measurable rainfall, the dew has been so heavy that the grass often doesn’t dry out until afternoon. There was a slight sprinkle this morning, but the sun is out now, so Barbara is grabbing the opportunity to get some yard work done. I’m doing laundry and my other typical Saturday chores, as well as continuing work on internationalizing the biology and chemistry kits.
I’ve already made up most of the substitute chemicals. All that remain are the 9.99% acetic acid, the 9.99% ammonia, and the 0.99% hydrochloric acid. There’s no danger of confusing either of the two acids with the more concentrated versions used in the US kits. The 6M acetic acid in the US kits is more than three times as concentrated as the 10% version for the international kits. The 6 M acetic acid has fumes that’ll knock your socks off; the 10% acetic acid smells like strong vinegar. The fumes from the 6 M hydrochloric acid in the US kits really strong; the fumes from the 1% hydrochloric acid are almost unnoticeable. The ammonia solutions do present a risk of confusion, because the 10% ammonia for the international kits is only slightly less concentrated than the 6 M ammonia used in the US kits. It’s impossible to discriminate the two by appearance or odor; both are water clear and have strong fumes. So I’m going to add a tiny amount of blue dye to the 10% ammonia for the international kits, just enough to make the solution noticeably bluish. Or I may do it the other way. Yeah, actually that makes more sense. The higher concentration has something more than the lower.
Thanks to everyone who commented or sent me email about international shipping with DHL, FedEx, or UPS. I ruled out all of those long ago. If the postal service can’t get it somewhere, I just won’t sell kits there. A year or so ago, when we first started shipping kits to Canada, I checked into using DHL, FedEx, or UPS. I called the 800 numbers for each of them and asked what should have been a simple question: “I have a box with the following dimensions and mass that contains the following items. How much will you charge me to ship it to a specific Canadian address?” None of the three could give me a specific dollar amount. There were so many potential added fees, many of which were variable and applied only under certain circumstances, that I couldn’t get even a ballpark number for what it would cost me to ship. For example, one of them (UPS I think) charges according to the distance that the recipient is from the local UPS office. Beyond x miles, a surcharge applies; beyond 2x miles, a higher surcharge applies. Another surcharge applies to residential versus business addresses, and a redelivery charge applies if the driver isn’t able to deliver the package on the first attempt. There were something like (and I am not making this up) 80 different types of surcharges. The customer service rep actually had the nerve to suggest that I open an account with them. She said that my account would be billed for the nominal charge until the package was delivered, after which my account might be billed additional surcharges retroactively. Jesus. Who could run a business that way? “Hire me to provide a service. After I’ve provided it, I’ll tell you how much you owe me.” So, yeah, I’m sticking with USPS Priority Mail for US shipments and USPS Priority Mail International for foreign shipments.
Same deal up here with the rain; every day, pretty much, for the past month; the ground is waterlogged and the Lake is up to the road, pier long since gone under. We had a lollapalooza monsoon t-storm last night and the rain came down in steady sheets, like being under a waterfall, for hours. Between that and the thunder, lightning, sticky heat and humidity and fog, and fireworks all over the area it coulda brought back unpleasant SEA flashbacks, but apparently that stuff is all fading away, finally, thank God.
Mrs. OFD off to Kansas tomorrow for a few days’ gig and I know she has Wyoming coming up soon, along with Boston and Alabama, but I have lost track; it’s gotten crazy.
I always find a little irony in your preference for a quasi fed gov service versus private enterprise. Ben Franklin must have a little smile. Oh well, whatever works.
I am not doctrinaire. I’d even use Microsoft software if it were the best choice.
If you absolutely have to get something somewhere in the world in a week or so and price is your third consideration, UPS is your service. But, our average cost to shop a CD to someone outside the USA is probably $50. Shipping them a set of our five software manuals ( http://www.winsim.com/doco.html ) is well north of $100 for our 12 lbs of dead trees. Some locations in the boonies, many of our customers are in plants in the boonies, can hit $200. But stuff gets to them.
I think that we get a 35% discount on UPS Worldship rates. We do not get a discount on UPS ground here in the USA but that is always $4 to $5. I do not know what discount we get on UPS overnight here in the USA, probably 35% also. That discount does not apply to fees though.
We stopped using USPS a decade ago when the failure to arrive rate started approaching 10%. And we had no one to talk to and the tracking was abysmal. But if you are very price sensitive, then yes, USPS may be the way to go. Especially if their tracking is better now.
Our loss rate in about two years and many hundreds of packages has been < 0.4%. Our rate of shipments arriving with any damage is ~ 1%, and all of that has been trivial--a broken beaker or thermometer, that sort of thing, and some of that was probably our fault. From my own experience and what others have told me, FedEx is much higher and UPS is much, much higher.
Raining cats and dogs here, and has been on and off since late last night. All kinds of stuff is growing in my yard, out-of-control.
We ship DVD’s for the legal video business solely by UPS—even for in-town addresses, because it always gets delivered and never has an item been lost. I have had horrible problems with non-delivery of USPS items over the years, including checks to my son when he was attending college. The bank charged $25 to stop one check—a pretty outrageous fee, IMO—but the fact is that the check was never located by USPS, and the bank said it was never presented for payment.
As Tiny Town slowly shuts down, the only UPS live pick-up location, inside a local store, also closed down, so when I am working on a project for the legal business to be sent from my home (not very often as everything is normally shipped out of Indianapolis), nowadays my only alternative is USPS. As I noted here, last year I had to ship a flash drive in a JetPack to a location in Indianapolis. For safety, the PO guy recommended sending it first-class with tracking and a delivery confirmation. So was it done. Package was never delivered. That was over a year ago, and I checked the tracking website at the first-year anniversary, and it still said “out for delivery”. I never received a delivery confirmation, of course. USPS says they have no way of determining what happened to the item, and no way of recovering it. The flash drive itself was only $12, and the contents were a backup of what already had been paid for, as the firm lost the original, so our business loss was minimal, but we do charge for that, and lost about $60 of income.
When my dad died, and I was here in Tiny Town while Jeri was in Germany, we mailed lots of paperwork back and forth—some related to living in Germany (signing tax forms), others related to settling my dad’s estate in Tiny Town. Every single envelope from Germany to me was quite clearly opened, with no explanation whatever as to why. Nothing I sent to Germany was opened. I don’t mean just one or some items opened, but every one of about a dozen different pieces sent over the course of the 2 months I was here.
After my mom passed, I figured I had better get my CD collection over to Germany, as we had no plans on returning to the US. Since I don’t use jewel cases, but rather, a much lighter plastic library storage slip, I was able to get everything in a USPS “M-Bag”. EIGHT MONTHS LATER, it finally arrived in Strausberg. Going the other way, my kids came to visit in the weeks after Jeri’s death and before my return, and each took 2 big bags with the airline limit back to the US, as did I, and the CD’s were divided among the 6 bags.
From what I am hearing, I would not be able to do an M-Bag again—not that I any longer have a need to. Over the years, USPS has failed me many times—not partially, but completely failed, without any method or system whatever in place to rectify any problem I have had. I suffered the full losses.
I have had damaged packages from UPS, but the items inside have never been damaged. Almost everyone these days ships things as ‘a box inside a box’, and that seems to relieve damage problems.
Oh, I’ve had lots of items damaged by FedEx and UPS, but none that I recall that were damaged by USPS. Just a couple weeks ago, I got a FedEx delivery. It was completely crushed, with glass tinkling inside it and bits coming out of the holes. I asked the FedEx guy, “Is that a box?”. He said that he couldn’t swear to it, but he thought it might have previously been a box. There were no corners or right angles left at all. He said that when they’d given him the box that morning he’d told them they had to be kidding, that no customer would accept delivery of something so obviously severely damaged. But they told him to take it out for delivery anyway and see if I’d accept it. Geez.
I hasten to add that this was a glassware sample (Petri dishes) sent to me by one of my regular wholesalers. It was properly packaged, a box within a box with packing peanuts isolating the inner box from the outer. In the inner box, the Petri dishes were wrapped heavily with bubble-wrap and further padded by more peanuts. And the box arrived so badly damaged that none of us could tell how many Petri dishes had been in there originally.
I’ve had even more frequent similar problems with UPS. There’s no way I’d use anything other than USPS unless forced. But to each his own. USPS is by far the best choice for me. Your mileage obviously varies.
Our rate of shipments arriving with any damage is ~ 1%, and all of that has been trivial–a broken beaker or thermometer, that sort of thing, and some of that was probably our fault. From my own experience and what others have told me, FedEx is much higher and UPS is much, much higher.
Oh yes, everything arriving via UPS looks like the box has tire tracks on it. My brother in law, a UPS truck loader, says that is from the conveyer accelerators.
I do know that the Amazon is using USPS for their free shipping nowadays. And that Amazon is working on their packaging. I just got five 100 CD rolls from them and they were very carefully packed. And the new WD external drive that I opened last night had very good packaging for the external drive inside the box.
Most services businesses are actually run that way. It is called Times and Materials (T&M). And that goes from plumbers to lawyers and even IT services by the big guys.
All this international commentary makes me wonder how in the world outfits like Aldi get stuff from Germany to the US profitably without broken goods. Not only do they get frozen or refrigerated products and cookies from Germany that are not broken, but even their freezer cases are made in Germany and shipped to stores in the US.
Aldi must ship by the container load and the costs are quite different in that scenario. They also get to distribute the cost across the number of products in that particular shipment. In any case, they would have special rates negotiated with the delivery companies because of the amount of goods they send annually. They also have control of the final leg with their warehouses and fleet of trucks that deliver to their stores. Can’t compare.
This may be of interest to some of you:
http://gizmodo.com/google-supposedly-paid-off-adblock-plus-to-not-block-go-682029020
Gawd, is there NO ONE who is not being co-opted in this country?
Me. I’m not being co-opted yet. Can someone please co-opt me? I could use the dough to supplement my UI. I’m cheap, too.
On second thought, the money must be good. Everybody in DC is on the take.
I was afraid of having problems with video editing on Linux using nVidia video, and fer crying out loud, I was right. Video is blanking out and googling shows many people are having the same problem with many stabs at a fix, but none permanent. I swear I’m going to end up on Apple with Final Cut before this is over. I should have just bit that bullet in the first place.
And at 22:30 EDT, just got a call from Mrs. OFD; I’d dropped her off at MIL’s house a couple of hours ago. Rousted by local PD officers and deputy sheriff there just now because a neighbor called in a B&E in-progress at MIL’s residence, knowing MIL was not there, apparently. Mrs. OFD beaucoups upset and PTSD kicking in from long-ago notification by other officers when her first husband got killed. Jesus wept.
They found the front door unlocked and heard movement inside and then went into full SWAT mode on her. Thank God and all His angels I was not there, as I told her; if I’d been half awake and gotten rousted to noise and yelling and lights as people came through the front door someone woulda got hurt bad. She says she heard no one ID themselves as cops, and she has fah bettuh hearing than me.
She really needed to get four or five hours sleep before an Ass-Crack-Of-Dawn flight and now that will be impossible.
Boy, am I glad I didn’t stay with her there, like I sometimes do, because of animals here and the stupid Bay Day bullshit here tomorrow, with hordes of drunks and dopers all around, for all I know.
Lynn wrote:
“I do know that the Amazon is using USPS for their free shipping nowadays. And that Amazon is working on their packaging. ”
I buy books (and nothing else) from Amazon and find that their packaging is quite variable. (The books come to me from Germany, UK, US, and other places.) My favourite is when the books are stacked on to a cardboard substrate and shrink wrapped in place, then placed in a box. You don’t need spongy peanuts or anything, and they arrive in beautiful condition.
The worst is when they’re put in a box that is too large for the books and there is no or inadequate packaging, like *deflated* air filled pillows. The books can end up partially jammed inside each other and dog eared. If the condition is bad enough I ask for replacements of the affected books.
And you can’t predict whether the packaging will be good or bad.
Wow! For years I’ve wondered what happened to the 30-40 Zip disks (Iomega, 100 MB each) I bought in 1998-99. I just found some of them, squirreled away behind an Office 97 disk/manual box someone gave me when I got my first PC in 1997.
The house cleanup continues, getting ready for sale. For the last month or so I’ve been filling my garbage bin, have it picked up on my side of the road, then refilling for when the truck collects on the other side of the road several hours later. I just parted with my copies of Das Kapital and Selected Works by Karl Marx, bought in 1980 and not read since.
@Marcelo: Yes, some parts of companies may run on T&M (never knew the term for it), but they still need to budget those expenses, and those are generally for services rendered (like IT support). Our host’s situation is different: He is selling products at a fixed price, and needs to be able to set that price. I’ve mostly been on the receiving end of DHL/UPS, and the fees to me as the recipient of a package (with fully pre-paid shipping) vary anywhere from $40 to $100. Whenever I order something from the US, I do anything I can to get the shipper to use USPS.
DHL/UPS also provide no sort of useful guarantee: We once had an overnight DHL delivery of $2000 of perishable goods sit for two weeks in a warehouse in summer – you can imagine what finally got delivered. What? We thought overnight delivery was guaranteed? To show us their generosity, they refunded the shipping costs.