I live in San Diego. The other day I sent 1 Alpine EH bomber each to a friend in Aurora, IL, and another in Napa, CA. The IL price was $11. The Napa price was $14. Equal weight, everything. More often than not I can send a 20lb box of beer to PA for $20, but the same box is $35 to Oregon. WTF OVER?
Not sure how remote these places are, but there are additional charges if your trade partner lives in a remote area. That could possibly be part of it.
That is weird for sure, I send all over the country by UPS for less than $15 though work. The only reason I can think of is most trucks ship West vs. East so shipping East is naturally cheaper by demand, but I only work in logistics so what do I know.
I've compared FedEx to UPS several times and UPS has always been absurdly higher. I don't know if it's a location thing (Pittsburgh and Cincy) or something else.
UPS is so damn easy for me - we have the WorldShip terminal at work with scale and label printer. I'd have to schedule FedEx pickup etc - so I guess the ease has a price.
Well what's the cost an 18# box fromm Boston to Alberquerque is $18 via UPS. What would Fedex be? ETA: I should add it is my company account, and being a coffee roaster the liquid is not a red flag.
Oh no! A thread about different pricing for different areas seems to be turning into another UPS vs. Fedex
Shipping prices in general are weird. I noticed it costs significantly more to ship from Fl to MN than it does from FL to CA, and that was with FedEX. Whtat the other guy said about remote areas seems right though, and makes sense if you think about it. Remote areas equal less trucks going there, more transfers, more milage out of the standard route, etc. On a side note I also noticed that UPS pricing is more related to weight than size of the box, as opposed to FedEX which seems to be concerned with both. I figured that out by initially typing in the wrong size of the box, going back and changing it, and noticing the price stayed the same. So no need to "under estimate" the size of the box as it seems so many people do. There's likely a limit to the no change in price with size descrepancy though.
Adding my 2 pennies. I just asked a similar question to my local FedEx store manager. He said the algorithm to determine cost is crazy (I took it that he just didnt understand it) but if factors in weight, box dimensions, shipping distance, residential vs busineess delivery endpoint, distance from major disto centers, etc. For your example, I assume box size on both shipments were equal, obviously weight equal, so I'm guessing the difference in cost comes from distance from distro center and maybe residential vs. business delivery.
It might also be that the box going East was on a plane and then in a truck less where as the box you send within the same state (or near you) stays in a truck the whole time and gas prices are a bigger expense in that case.
Referring to the next post (about being in a rural area), I live 15 minutes from a big ass UPS facility so maybe that's why that 25 lb behemoth wasn't too high (assuming that was me you were referring to).
