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Comment by ianhawes | Hacker News Reader

From what I am reading, the limit is only on the number of packages that FedEx and UPS will pick up directly from the shipping depot.

This is typically a free service they provide (though paid for smaller volume). It would seem to me that renting a truck and delivering packages to the local center would be the easiest workaround.

The article mentions a company shipping through UPS when they capped FedEx and having to pay the retail rates on their UPS account. I cannot imagine that paying the UPS retail shipping rate is cheaper than renting a truck for a month to ride out the limitations.

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We were explicitly told they would deny our packages at the depot/hub and would be limited to 5-10 packages at each FedEx Store in the area. All packages in the area still flow through the hub and an end of day report for packages scanned is used to enforce this.

Re: our UPS rate, we aren't paying retail rates, thankfully. But the final weeks of Q4 is not an ideal to negotiate favorable rates when they know we have no other options.

Thank you for the clarification (I'm assuming you're the company mentioned in the article). That is crazy and I applaud you for going to the media about this.

One fun thing is that the FedEx lot near me is already full of rental trucks, Penske, Uhaul, etc. as they use them to expand their delivery fleet.

Very true, same with my local center. I would imagine that could increase the cost of renting your own Penske/Uhaul box truck.

I imagine there is an increase over last year, but every year there are expansive rentals of trucks. In our area we find that sometimes multiple trucks meet at the grocery store parking lot and further pass out packages.

I wonder if the issue is more the volume over the year never let up and rolled into a marginally increased holiday shipping or if it's really a multiple factor of shipped packages over last year.

Either way, Penske , Uhaul, etc. who've probably had less rentals this year vs previous, must be happy to see their stuff being delivered.

Even amazon has people delivering from their own cars around here.

I doubt it, those companies probably love this arrangement as almost no one moves in the winter.

Look at the directionality of prices for one way rentals. Because of the outflow from big cities NY area pickup -> Southern US dropoff prices are still 3x+ vs going the other direction, where I believe they used to be similar prices both ways.

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