How UPS makes more money
 

For years I have never paid attention to my UPS bill, just gets paid. A month ago it was outrageously high because they "audited" the size of the box and bumped up the dimensions so that it fit into the next category. Thing is, the Home Depot TV box is only one set of dimensions and I ship them a lot, and I always enter the physical dimensions. Called them up and got back $158.

Just looked at this week's bill and they've gotten a little smarter bumping up dimensions by 1 inch on each side of a pre-sized, exact sized box. Only $1.59 extra was added to the shipment but multiply that by millions of shipments they do per day and it adds up pretty fast.

Some upper manager must be going for a promotion so he figured out a way to bump up his numbers.

Reminds me of the Joe Pesci Lethan Weapon Drive-thru scene, but replace "drive-thru" with "shipping company".

or this sort of thinking
"So what happens to all of those partial pennies that get rounded down?"

A long time ago, I knew a guy who pulled a similar scam. Back when IBM's patent ran out on their formula for copier toner, he had a huge batch of the stuff made up and set up a boiler room operation to sell it over the phone. This was a very successful venture and he soon had a long list of customers. When invoices went out, he had his people add random charges for stuff like 'handling' or 'packaging' in addition to the agreed-upon price for the toner. It was only a few bucks per invoice, but it added up when he was billing a couple thousand customers per month. If anyone called to ask about the extra charge, they said it was a 'mistake' and immediately refunded the money. Hardly anyone ever called about it though.

Ask Richard Pryor when he was in Superman 3.

The problem of UPS finding ways to slip things past its customers isn't new.

Office Space

I just watched Office Space yesterday before the game.....a classic.

Yeah, I get that every now and then when I ship something, but it's not easy to fight it when you're shipping onsey-twosey maybe 3 times a year.