A comment on price, product, & shipping

[A Lurker]

Last week I saw a post on the wreck for 50% off list on 24" Gross Stabil clamps from Amazon. I've taken advantage of various Bessey sales in the past and all of my clamps are Bessey except 2 Gross Stabil 24" clamps I picked up a while ago at a show for a good price. It seems that with all those red clamps hanging there, I generally choose the yellow & black ones for most mid size jobs. The Gross Stabils seem to engage and disengage easier than the Besseys, provide more clamping power, and the pads seem more immune to glue. Only negative I can comment on with the Gross Stabils is that they are the Scott Phillips Autograph Series ... what a putz! If your going to have an autographed clamp at least have Norm do it.

FYI, Amazon raised price a bit since last week, but still at 48%off list (watch wrap):

I bought two. Yet as Amazon began processing the order, they treated it as 2 orders of one clamp each. Double emails and even separate shipping tracks. Well they arrived today (1 day before estimated minimum time of arrival ... thanks again UPS). My wife looks out and says there are 2 of the biggest boxes ever on the front porch ...WHAT DID YOU BUY NOW? "Just 2 clamps honey" :) Each 24 inch clamp came in its own

40"X16"X12"box filled with enough inflated plastic bags that I can make a new solar cover for the pool next year. Again one has to wonder how Amazon stays in business.

Jerry

[Andy]

BY THE WAY: the Jet 24" parallel clamp is now on sale at Amazon, for $25.72 - just enough so shipping is free (as if you could order just one...) In response to your post, the really funny part is when 2 identical items, shipped at the same time, arrive packed in totally different containers. I ordered a bunch of K-bodies from Amazon a while ago, and some came in too-large boxes, while some came in very thick, very long cardboard tubes. Of course they were all shipped individually, even when several clamps would have fit in one tube or box. Some of the boxes were smashed and clamp heads cracked, and some of the boxes looked untouched. I was just thinking the other day how Amazon's shipping practices might change if UPS charged by size in addition to weight - I've received an awful lot of pre-packed air from them. How many more boxes would fit in a UPS truck, and how much gas would be saved, if things were packed in appropriately-sized boxes? Hm. Anyway, thanks for your comments on the Gross Stabils. I don't figure it'd be too hard to wire-wheel off some guy's signature, if it didn't wear off on its own. Thanks, Andy

[Leuf]

I ordered 4 18" uniklamps recently. 4 emails, 4 huge boxes. Must have taken me an hour to cut all those air bags. I'd rather pay more ordering them from Lee Valley to save myself having to get rid of all the excess packaging.

And then there was the Delta stand. The stand itself was in a long narrow box, just wide enough to get a shipping label on, weighing 30 lbs, and being all steel pretty much indistructible. So Amazon naturally put it in a HUGE box with air bags. The box got to me about half the height it started out as, with a lot of the air bags flattened. Of course the actual box inside was fine.

-Leuf

[Ron]

I believe the bags are initially filled with Amazonian Hot Air, as an attempt to reduce the weight of the package at the UPS scales and therefore their shipping costs ;)

Ron

[John]

That's similar to something that happened to my wife. She ordered some towels and washcloths from Amazon, on sale at a good price. The four towels and four washcloths arrived in eight separate boxes, each filled with air pillows to protect the apparently-fragile towels. I tool a picture -- meaning to send it to Amazon, though I never did -- that shows the 3 or 4 foot high stack of boxes with the small-by-comparison stack of actual product on top of them. Bizarre.

To reply by e-mail, use jcarlson631 at yahoo dot com

John

[Leuf]

I wonder how much helium costs :)

You gotta figure Amazon has a pretty sweetheart deal with UPS, so it's cheaper for them to just box things individually than pay the extra labor to combine them.

It must be some pretty interesting conversations between Amazon and UPS. UPS sure doesn't want to lose their business. Amazon is pretty screwed if UPS suddenly stops servicing them. Hi, Fedex, can you pick up a million packages tomorrow?

-Leuf

[Tom Veatch]

On 31 Oct 2006 09:44:45 -0800, "Andy" wrote: ...

...

They, UPS, may be headed in that direction if they are not already there. I was on their website several days ago getting an estimated shipping cost, and one of the inputs for the estimate was the length, width, and height of the container, as well as the weight.

Can't comment on the effect dimensions have on the shipping cost since I didn't try it with several different sizes for the same weight.

[Leuf]

This has to do with the extra charges for oversized packages. $6 for length over 60" or second largest dimension over 30" And then there's the whopping $40 "large package" charge for length + girth over 130"

-Leuf

[B A R R Y]

They've been there for years, but have only started diligently checking when fuel prices skyrocketed.

The bicycle biz got hammered, as they were slipping oversize but relatively light packages by UPS as "normal" size for years. UPS rates went up so much that some companies, like Trek, will go as far as to package the same bike two ways, one large box or two "UPS legal" boxes, right at the Chinese factory.

Since large bicycle orders typically go by truck, the single box gets preference on those orders, while the onesie-twosies go UPS.

While UPS wasn't looking, many bike manufacturers used higher pre-fab levels on lower to mid-end bikes as a selling point to dealers. Now the bikes are being shipped less and less assembled, due to skyrocketing shipping.

[Doug Miller]

That isn't anything new. UPS has asked for dimensions for years.

No effect at all until length plus girth (longest dimension, plus twice the sum of the other two dimensions) equals or exceeds 84 inches. Then there's a substantial upcharge. Another upcharge occurs at (IIRC) 120 inches.