Can you say impatient?

OK, so I admit it. I can be very impatient sometimes. And one of those times is when I am waiting for a package. The other day I purchased a camera and I did not pay extra for faster shipping. It's coming to Milwaukee from NY by UPS Ground and it's going to take a week (from the day I ordered it) to get here.

I guess what gets me about this is that when you go to the tracking site it's obvious that they seem to intentionally let the package sit places longer than it needs to sit. Why do they do this? The cynic in me says that it's so people will pay extra for the faster shipping. Obviously, there's no reason to pay more if it's not going to get here any faster.

And, in this case (and I'm not ripping on the company I ordered from--they are a very well-regarded source of camera gear) it's even weirder because even though I paid for the product immediately, they waited 48 hours to ship it. This same company will ship your order right away if you pay extra for faster shipping.

Now it's with UPS, but it's not going to get here until next Tuesday. It was shipped yesterday afternoon. If they had put it on the truck then, it would probably get to suburban Chicago sometime later today. I suppose it will then just sit there until Monday when they will bring it to Milwaukee (about a 2 hour trip), and then they'll put it on the delivery truck on Tuesday.

Usually when you think about paying for faster delivery I think most of us think about them putting the item on a plane and flying it to the destination right away. In my situation, though, that's not it. A truck would get it here in 24 hours or less. What you are really paying for is to have them not let the package sit around for days at various locations along the way.

This whole thing is compounded for me by the experiences I have had with ordering from Northern Brewer. They are about 375 miles from where I live. Depending on traffic and how fast you drive, it's, oh, about a 5-7 hour drive (whereas from here to NY is maybe about 20 hours).

Whenever I have ordered from NB, though, I have never paid extra for fast shipping. Yet, somehow they get my orders here so fast it's startling. When you see how fast they process and ship their orders it's obvious to me that the camera company I ordered from is trying to encourage customers to buy more expensive shipping by making the standard shipping artificially slow.

with regards to your package sitting around at UPS distribution centers, they sit around there waiting for a truck to fill up, so the package sits in NY till there is a full truck load going to chicago. They don't want to drive all that way with a 1/2 full truck it costs to much in man power and fuel. The same thing in chicago, it may only be a 2 hour drive from chicago to your place, but they are not leaving chicago till they have a full truck.

If you pay for the faster shipping, they do send it a little differently, and don't always wait for the truck to be entierly full. Additionally the more a company sends out via any shipper (norther brewer) the more likely they are to fill up a truck load of stuff. Northern brewer packages probably go to a distribution center that is in between you and them, and then out to you in fairly quick succession, also on shorter trips it is easier to justify not having the truck full so it is busting at the seams.

It is all supply chain logistics, and honestly with regards to shipping you get what you pay for, if you want it fast you have to pay for it, and in my opinion, most of the time it is not worth it.

The one thing you never want to do is pay for cheap shipping and then write in big letters "Urgent" or "Fast Delivery" on the box, A friend of mine worked for UPS and he said most distribution centers have a special shelf for packages with these labels, it gets emptied once a week.

There's nothing especially devious about giving priority choices to the customer and having associated fees. Since you're a single customer, it's easy to imagine in your head the order picker and shipping staff looking at the order and saying, "ah, this guy didn't pay for expedite shipping, we'll pick and ship after lunch". It's probably a little busier than that. I suspect the expedite queue goes first no matter how many orders pile up in the standard shipping line.

On the UPS end though, I've found that they MUST have changed their practices around in the recent years. It used to be that a package would make forward progress about once a day. I'd watch a package move a few states per day until it arrived. When it got to my state, I'd have it the next day. You can tell they've been optimizing the movement due to the gas prices. I think ground shipments will ALWAYS wait until a semi trailer is full to the brim and it probably makes a direct run from state to state. The rush shipments likely use smaller trucks and will use more incremental movements with resorts. Just my guess and why I HATE UPS ground now.