The Overland Route

From the “things that make you shake your head” department…

Online shipping logic is getting fairly good, at least among the big e-commerce sites, but sometimes it could use a firm injection of common sense.

I ordered an item Tuesday from a “large online retailer that made its reputation selling books”.  It’s a small item, less than a pound, and I selected normal ground freight.

Late yesterday I received an “it’s shipped” e-mail, so I went out today to look at the tracking info.

To my surprise, this item shipped from a location local to me—about a ten minute drive west of here, in fact.  Unfortunately, it went on ground freight from “a company that made it’s reputation for on-time air freight”.

The tracking detail itself is a hoot.  It went from 10 miles west of me, to 20 miles south of me, and from there to a sort facility another 30 miles west.  This thing is going to have an extra hundred miles on it before it gets here.

But that’s neither here nor there—the slightly irritating fact is that these people deliver ground freight in 3+ days, whether it’s across town or across the country.  A slightly smarter shipping interface might have known that from there to here is one of those occasional routes where US mail is faster, and likely cheaper—items mailed on Mon-Thurs pretty reliably arrive here the next day.

Oh well… The miracle of the dancing bear isn’t about how great a dancer the bear is — the miracle is that he dances at all…

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