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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

The hard truth: If it isn't worth your time to buy a scale or measuring tape, you aren't giving them enough business to be worth making all these expensive changes.

This is like me walking into my local supermarket and asking them to replace the meat section with a giant vegetarian foods section — yes, it would make me personally overjoyed, but it probably wouldn't be a good business move.

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Not to mention that the "fix" for this "problem" is simply to guess high.

Don't have a scale to weigh a package that feels about the same as a pound of butter? Enter the weight as 5 lbs. They'll happily charge you more and deliver it.

This is what I do, but then nobody's happy. I'm probably paying over the odds, and they're probably shipping goods in a van which is underweight. They could fit another parcel on there and make more money.

This actually formed part of my experience with UPS. When the guy said to me "How much does this TV weigh?" I had no idea: the TV was in my parents' house a few hundred miles away. And why the fuck should I have to weigh it? He wanted my parents to take a heavy TV set and put it on some scales in order to weigh it. When I told him to make it up he said "but we might get it wrong and undercharge you!" I don't care. Just charge me a penalty or something. Shipping is one of those things that I don't have any sort of inclination as to how much a competitive price is.

At this point, you're not looking for a carrier. You're looking for a moving company, someone who comes to your house, wraps up the object, transports it to the desired location and unwraps it. There are definitely companies in that business, but UPS/Fedex/et al generally aren't, because that's not what their customers want.

Amazon uses something similar to this if you order a TV from them - they have someone who actually brings the TV into your house, unwraps it, connects it and takes away the box.

No, I'm looking for a courier whose responsibility for the item extends to packing it up for me. I don't have packing materials. I could obtain them, but these guys are in the business. How many claims do they have to deal with for goods damaged in transit every year? How many could be solved if a guy with a few rolls of bubble-wrap and a pre-printed box of the right size wraps up the item for you.

Again, ad nauseum, I am not in any way suggesting that UPS or FedEx should be doing this.

Here in the US, UPS, in fact, will do this for you. (http://www.theupsstore.com/products-services/packaging-shipp...) They won't go to your location, but I think that's more because there isn't sufficient demand for that service (at a profitable level) than their not wanting to do that. You can also hire intermediary services that will show up at your house, wrap an item and ship it via a third-party carrier (transparent to you.) I've done that for large items that had to be sent via rail, like furniture.

I know you're frustrated by folks saying that you're suggesting UPS or Fedex do this, but your post title suggests that's what you're asking for, and it's also rational to view it as more likely that those carriers would create this service, or someone would create it as an overlay (MVNO-style) utilizing their existing shipping networks, than creating an entire new shipping system - the cost would just be astronomical to create a whole new transport network for this.

If there are enough low-volume customers willing to pay a premium for a higher level of service, then it might might economic sense. Sure, a small individual customer isn't giving them enough business to be worth making all of these expensive changes, but the aggregate of all small customers combined might.

It isn't quite like replacing the meat section with a vegetarian section... its more like adding an organic foods section to a supermarket. Those supermarkets still might make most of their money on things like the meat, but certain people willing to pay a premium for perceived quality take advantage of the organic section. People who want meat can still buy meat, but there are enough people who buy organic to make it worth dedicating the shelf space.

Edit: I wonder if the reason we don't see this level of service in the market yet is because the type of players who would benefit most from these features are likely to be small local/regional carriers who lack the expertise/resources to develop and implement the technology. If I'm in Chicago and I need to get some time-sensitive documents to a law firm by the end of the day, I call a small local courier.

Perhaps the best solution would be a third-party SaaS platform that offers these advanced logistics/tracking/service features and targets smaller local/regional carriers. A single third party developer could spread development costs over a large number of customers in order to build a much more robust platform than would be economically feasible to develop in-house.

Integration with the small couriers systems would be a problem. You'd probably have to design the thing end-to-end then get them to migrate

(note: I'm only just discovering EDI, it might be thai this isn't as big a problem as it appears)

I don't anything about couriers' systems to have an idea whether or not it would be feasible to build something that integrates with them (or how difficult it would be to design one end-to-end).

If you could design the thing end-to-end, I wonder if switching barriers would make adoption difficult.

The harder truth: You've misread my putting forth the case for a disruptive personal shipping company as my attempt to get UPS and FedEx to change their businesses.

(That'd be kind of odd on a site where discussion centres around technology and startups…)

When you can't get the vegetarian food you want from the supermarket, you go to the smaller, pricier, vegetarian outlet.

The problem is that it isn't cost-effective for large national players to fight for this business, and small players face powerful barriers to entry.

One potentially viable solution to addressing this problem might be an adaptation of the "Shipping Consolidator" business model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_delivery#Role_of_parcel...).

Shipping consolidators pick up a shipper's parcels, sort and route them, then enter them into the Postal system for final delivery.

A shipping consolidator startup would be able to offer many of the value-added services on your wishlist without facing the barriers of starting a stand-alone national carrier or the limitations associated with local/regional carriers.

Of course, you lose control of the actual handling of the package after turning it over to a 3rd party carrier. Still, I'd imagine that a shipping consolidator using RFID data could develop a sufficiently sophisticated predictive model capable of providing much more accurate delivery estimates than those provided by the UPS, FedEX, et al.

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