insurance and shipping with UPS

Here is my somewhat jaundiced view of shipping in the USA from the last 20 years.

Small items up to about 2-3lb weight I find the USPS is very good and fairy priced, tbh in all this time they have never damaged anything and only lost one item.

Medium weight items up to abut 15lb is pretty much a wash cost wise between USPS,UPS and Fedex. Again USPS have been good, Fedex have been good and the only times I tried UPS resulted in damage or seriously delayed delivery!

Heavy items over 30lb it is no contest , Fedex are usually far and away cheaper. Their service is faster than UPS, usually by at least a day on say coast to coast . They have not damaged anything as of yet or lost anything. UPS I have already detailed one of their train wrecks which was not the only one.
In my area at least Fedex also delivers normal ground on a Saturday without having to pay extra for this, UPS do not.

saying all of that I do use UPS a lot...….for next day air letters, this they have been very good at for 20 years never losing one or damaging one, I suspect a completely different department. 

I have also had issues with UPS. Sent an SME 345 tonearm to a friend in California (I’m in in the Toronto area). I keep all my original packaging for ALL my gear, so no problem with me packing it properly in it’s original packaging, and then double boxing. I brought it to UPS and was told that in order to have it insured, it would have to be packed by UPS !! Yeah right, like I’m going to let those chimps handle a tonearm !! I opened my double box, and the original SME packaging and asked if they could possibly package it better than the manufactures original packaging. The answer was obviously "no". So, they agreed to insuring if they did the double boxing (for an additional fee of course) So it arrives in LA, and of course, it’s damaged!! Go figure!! We fought with UPS on both ends for weeks. Luckily we both had photos pre and post shipping. We were eventually awarded partial compensation (around 75%) if I remember correctly. We settled for this, as the damage was purely cosmetic, and not affecting the performance of the arm. UPS is not to be trusted is my lesson learned. Now I have another shipping issue coming up that I am dreading. I bought a ClearAudio Double Matrix Pro Sonic RCM about a year and a half ago. It has to go back to the importer in Montreal for a warranty repair. It is fairly heavy, about 40 lbs. and is very expensive. I now have to figure out a method of getting it from here to there, and properly insuring it for replacement value. I am almost considering driving the 8 - 10 hrs each way to be on the safe side. What a hassle shipping has become.

Talking of UPS, I am waiting for an amp to be delivered which unfortunately the seller insisted on using a local UPS store to pack and ship as they do not have oem packing for it.
This is travelling from Cali to Florida so we will see how it fares, I hope for the best but I will be covered one way or another.
Hope it does not turn into the same mess as the OP post though.

Spin4cards-
Maddening, I know. For "premium" services like Priority, Express, and COD,
the insurance is included up to a certain amount. The firm can't include big insurance automatically because the few claimants would raise rates for all.
If you've got something truly valuable, Registered is the way to go. It's not only much safer but when we're talking thousands in value, it actually costs less.

Based on the name, I presume that you're mailing mainly Baseball cards and things of that sort. Small, light, inexpensive to mail while still possiblycontaining items of considerable value. Those are going First Class which has long been the basic letter rate. Those aren't automatically insured because of the volume realized. At least that's my take. Upper Managementnever gives us any rationale as to the why of things. We get the rates and guidelines and very rarely the thought behind why they are set.

In any case, First Class being the basic rate for small items not mailed in bulk can be insured, as you note, but aren't automatically. Imagine, if you will, if all letters carried some sort of insurance. We're not talking millions of pieces in that category but billions. I used to get calls all the time about what one can do if a letter goes astray. A lot of those letters contained checks of various stripes, some quite large. While there are clumsy mechanisms in place that help us stumble through finding packages, even small ones, letter rate being both small and exceedingly numerous, poses a real problem. Should the Post Office include some sort of indemnity on the smallest, most numerous items, one could expect a deluge of claims thatwould raise rates to uncomfortable levels.

Now Officially, I don't know any of that. That's never Officially stated anywhere that I know of and I was there for over 45 years before retiring a few months ago. Common sense though leads me to those conclusions.
To oversimplify, For 50¢ what do you expect?


Realistically, there could be some sort of separation between actual letters and Small Parcels with the small parcel category including some sort of indemnity. I don't know that it's ever been proposed. Those things go through the Postal Rate Commission and we have some serious, high level intellect operating there. At the local level we're frequently puzzled with what goes on higher up the chain.

Isn't that the case with every business?

If there's something that I've neglected in my aimless ramblings here, please do ask. I've likely missed something and I'll do my best to reply.

The last time I shipped by UPS I was told insurance would only cover damage if they packed the item. If I packed, insurance only reimbursed if the the package was lost. So, contrary to several comments here, packing the item yourself is not a great solution either. I haven't shipped UPS since.