Printing FedEx shipping lable from home - weight?

to argue about "stealing" from fedex when shipping beer is hypocritical. shipping beer across state lines is illegal (albeit as illegal as jaywalking) and by doing so, you are stealing from the government that charges taxes on the transportation of alcohol across state lines (or so i understand it) - but bottom line is your argument is about as valid as the environmentalist preaching about littering and protecting the environment as he flicks his cigarette butt out the window while driving his gas guzzling non-environmental car.

fedex/ups/walmart etc know WAY more about these kinds of things than you can imagine and they've crunched the numbers and found the sweet spot for opportunity costs without reaching diminishing returns by spending too much on correcting these problems. that's not to say that this all is or is not stealing...it is a system that takes all of this into account. it is set up to encourage the consumer to set up their own shipments thus making a better user experience for the consumer and avoiding the need to overstaff locations to manually take shipments. in fact, they encourage you to do this by offering discounts on your shipping rates!

if you want to be a crusader, be a crusader...but look in the mirror before you preach. being factual with your fedex forms and then not legally shipping alcohol across state lines and paying appropriate fees is essentially saying it is cool to be selectively honest. whatever you do, just be consistent.

 

spot on. its cognitive dissonance, or more specifically dissonance reduction, i.e. lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors, (the fact that shipping beer is illegal).

 

I have no comment on the content of your post, I just applaud you for the use of the word infinitesimal

 

What you are doing with your parsley and what others are doing with the packages is deceiving and wrong. There is no argument the other way. The only thing up for debate is whether you are okay doing something wrong and deceiving.
I have marked packages lower weight when shipping with FedEx, I knew it was wrong, but I still did it, and honestly I felt kind of bad (that is just the way I am). However, my FedEx places are sharp and have readjusted the weights on everything (even when I put honest weights, like 25lbs, I will see it adjusted to 25.4lbs, or maybe 24.8lbs). I am guessing it is part of their process to automatically weigh and update all packages. Because I know they do this I have no problem now guesstimating the weight (I don't have a scale) and letting them correct it, knowing that they will.

 

do they just bill your card automatically if you are under? Or whats the process for that? I do have an account with UPS, so they have my info..

 

I have noticed when I use my account (usually I bill other people's account because most of my shipping is as a trustee/proxy) that it takes a while for the bill to come through. I am guessing they wait for delivery and then bill according to the information they have, whether that is the information you put down or information they entered/corrected.

 

I'm not deceiving anyone. In no way do I alter anything. The PLU is clearly printed on a bright yellow band around the bunch. The cashier chooses to ignore that and use their knowledge of PLUs to type it in without checking. I don't stop the cashier if he or she rings it up correctly or incorrectly. In fact, the first time it happened I corrected the cashier. 3-5 minutes later and after a call to the manager they had removed the item and charged me correctly. Meanwhile, several people behind me waited. I value that 5 minutes of my Saturday morning more than $1, and I value others time even more than my own. Furthermore, my youngest brother is a head clerk for the same grocery chain, but in another location and they always value a quick and friendly checkout over small misclassfications, ie ringing something up as non organic when it is organic. The loss at the POS is less than their anticipated loss of making a big deal out of things.

I guesstimate the weight as close as I can. I'm not putting 1lb on a 15lb package, but I'm also not going to feel bad if I guess my package weighs 8 pounds but it's actually more like 12 and FedEx doesn't adjust.

I guess i just feel like these sort of things even out in life. We all get screwed from time to time, and we all get lucky from time to time. I'm a firm believer in paying it forward so you have my promise that I will use my savings to buy more coffee for people behind me in line, to fill an expired meter around my office, or my number one principle of always buying someone's car wash when they take their mats out of the car prior to pulling in the wash bay at a busy car wash.

 

I seriously cannot believe this conversation is persisting. EVERY DAMN ONE OF US IS A THIEF!!! (Albeit a bunch of Robin Hoods...Stealing from the rich <FedEx, UPS, GOV> and giving to the poor <Paying it forward to lowly college beer traders>.)

GET OVER IT!!! (...and quit making me keep reading more posts on this. Obviously I am not interested. )

Oh, and don't EVER expect me to ship a box of used underwear instead of beer.

 

This isn't "stealing" per se, it's "theft of services" the relevant part of which definition for this discussion commonly goes something like this: "knowingly securing the performance of a service by deception or threat". Whether you are counting on a shipping service to correct your intentional under weighing of a package or not, the end result is the same.

 

i got the same, everytime i shoot low they adjust it. the people i offer "trustee" services for mentioned that their boxes had the weight corrected. i guess my local office checks everything.

 

I am starting to see a pattern here, I use UPS and have not noticed any recalculation of weights, I am wondering if FedEx is just more on top of things like this?

 

I agree with the fact that it is stealing... If I was doing my taxes and Decided to put that i made $20,000 this year instead of $120,000 and they don't catch it does it mean what I did was any less wrong? I am still in effect stealing.

If I was at Home depot and am buying a few things and I see that they don't scan in the $500 Dewalt tool kit am I ETHICALLY off the hook? No, not at all I should point it out and say "sorry. i think you missed this"

In fact once at the bank I was given an extra $100 bill by mistake. Could I have just pocketed the money? probably, but I know that somewhere that would have to have been accounted for so the next day I walked back in and explained to the tellers who were very relieved to find out since it did come up as missing but they couldn't account for where it had been.

If you dont have a scale and give an honest estimate, then that sits ok with me. I don't think you are blatantly trying to rip off someone. But if you put 1 lb on anything then...wow... would you do the same thing at the local home brew supply store and say you got 1 lb of grain when in fact you have 2, or however many? What about pirated software or music? its all the same ethically.

Yes I agree that shipping beer across state lines is another ethical thing, but I am not selling it or making a profit on it at all. I liken it to if i was to drive to another state with a 6-pack to share with a friend.


If you are ok with blatantly ripping off companies then that's on you, I feel that ethically I wouldn't want someone to do that to me. In fact if they dont catch it then they may be out some money (especially f its not just ground), and in tern that's lost revenue for them, and thus they can not pay their employees as much or offer incentives or bonuses. so while a few people may have jobs to catch users ripping them off, the rest are penalized for it.

There is a farm near where my fiends live and they have coolers for milk, meat and a freezer for home made ice cream. At 11 pm we can drive down there and get what we need, we put our money in the box, take our change and are on our way. There isnt anyone there most of the time and it works on the honor system. Because they dont check how much I am taking then I should just take everything? how about the cash box too???

If they weighed every box then the whole operation would take a lot more time, your package may not get there in 2 to 3 days, during heavy shipping times it may be 2 weeks....

 

Comparing a mom and pop farm to a multinational billion dollar company doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and they could easily weigh every package that comes through their system without slowing anything down, but it would cost them money for the equipment, and evidently they don't want to spend any of their profits to do so.

 

Having employees reweigh when you drop off would probably put a big dent in it. That's why I'm not sympathetic at all about complaints that this is stealing, if someone isn't going to do their job it's not my problem.

 

I think ethically its the same thing. If i steal $20 from a kid down the street or a millionair its still wrong. One may not feel the sting as much as another but Ethically its the same.

They COULD weigh everything but then they would have to charge more to recoup the cost for the equipment, and they may not be able to delivering the time frame you are used to.

All in all if you are estimating and doing a decent job then I have no problem with that. If you are off by a little bit ok.... I dont think its that big of a deal. but if someone puts 1 lb on every box that may be 20 lbs or more, then that I have a big issue with.

All in all, its your life, do as you want. but I prefer to be more honest in that respect. Here where I work we use UPS a lot, I mean A LOT, we ship out hundreds of boxes a day sometimes, and we weigh every box.



FYI as far as UPS is concerned the dimensions of the box are not that important until you get into dimensional weight (IE a box of packing peanuts would go by the size, not the weight, or if you had one long package like a flag pole to would be different then a small box of the same weight)

 

I think I misunderstood what you were saying then. I thought you were putting some parsley in a bag with something cheaper. Or going out of your way to try and hide the parsley with the cilantro. Sorry. I have had similar experiences, I have had a clerk ring up the wrong number for a cheaper item and say "oops, oh well".

I do the estimation on packages too, I try to get close but don't fret if i am off.

 

Ok, I can see your point, but if you owned a small business... say a supermarket, and I came in and bought say saffron, which last time I bought some was $12 for .06 oz, and I told one of your employees that I had an oz when in face I had 3 and they didn't weight it I shouldn't feel bad becuase they were not doing their job?

Again, they probably have a lot of other things to do and weighing every package would limit their time to take every customer and make sure that everything gets done by the end of the day.

We have a daily pick up so we could probably get away with even more since we are not dropping it off, but we dont.

If you want to be dishonest then thats your choice, Im not going to try to force you to change, i know I cant. I just wanted to say Kudos to those who have voiced their opinions that it is wrong and they dont support it.

Its just funny becuase if we found out that one of these companies was being dishonest to us we would all be up in arms over it! even if we didnt check and "do our jobs" for years and had found out that they were selling us 10 oz instead of 12 oz in our favorite frosty beverages.

 

Maybe fedex doesn't care for the weight you put down but I know for a fact UPS does. I got letters home from UPS because someone used my name and address and significantly under weighed the box and UPS telling me I have a bill adjustment and need to pay the difference. The packages were approx 20-30 underweighed.

 

if you do your best to give an honest estimation then good, I think you are doing your best given that you may not have a scale or accurate tools.


If you tell the clerk "hey you rang this in wrong" and they let it go then I can go either way on that. if its a small difference then the time involved to correct it may not be worth the 30 cents or whatever. If you bring it to their attention then I think you made an honest attempt to rectify it, and ethically its better than seeing them ring up 10 packs of beer and they didnt notice the 2 under your cart and you dont ever say anything.