Regarding Freight Forwarders

Hey kids, let’s talk about something important: Freight Forwarding.

via GIPHY

I know the postage rates are too damn high, especially on international shipping, ++especially for international express shipping. Not much I can do about that other than vote carefully to try to prevent the destruction of one of Benjamin Franklin’s legitimate children, the United States Postal Service. Unfortunately, Black Blood of the Earth and the Steins of Science must ship international express mail if I want them to not get stuck in customs hell and get to you in a timely manner. Also, international priority mail isn’t much cheaper than express but ends up being is A LOT slower.

The cleverer monkeys in far flung lands, New Zealand comes to mind, might turn to a service known as freight forwarding to try to keep those shipping costs down. If you’re not familiar with it, this is the equivalent of a Canadian having a PO box just over the border in America to ship things to (which I’m pretty sure is why Sumas, WA exists) except that it’s a shipping container which will be loaded onto a boat or plane, consolidated with everyone else’s packages, bound for $INSERT_COUNTRY_HERE. Their business model is built on it being much cheaper for you to ship in one of their one consolidated container of everyone’s stuff with their freight rates, after you to first ship to them at in-country rate, than it is for you to ship directly. Great, right?

Well, no. This comes at the cost of speed, which means using a freight forwarder is a guaranteed Bad Time for shipping BBotE. Unless you’re going directly to pick up from the freight forwarder’s depot in your country, for your package to get to you the forwarder will now need to ship it to you, which is almost always done at the slowest & cheapest rate, burning more time. But that’s BBotE, as long as you’re patient this is fine for the non-perishable Steins of Science right?

Sadness.jpg – The first stein broken in transit in over 7 year. Last one got run over in its box by a tug at a Hawaiian airport.

Ah, no, because this runs face first into the other part of the freight forwarder profit model. They are making money off of you through their flat, very cheap rate for a cargo container, regardless of content, and it is in their interest to stuff it as completely full as possible to maximize the profit per container. This is proper and reasonable, except this often comes at the cost of bulky but necessary packaging the protect fragile things. The results of trying to ship a Stein of Science without all the cushioning and heavy duty cardboard box are shown to the right. But this an insured shipment, you can just file a claim, right?

That’s a question of what your contract with the freight forwarder looks like because as far as the USPS is concerned they successfully delivered a parcel where you told them to send it, the freight forwarder. What happens after delivery is not their concern. My experience of what freight forwarder agreements look like may be summed up as somewhere between “Go fuck yourself, you knew what you were doing” and “Sorry, you’re shit out of luck, buddy”.

In conclusion, I did put some thought into the Funranium Labs store’s shipping module and packaging. If you mess with that by using a freight forwarder you are Fucking Around and very likely to Find Out.