How Much?

Yesterday I decided to mail two packages. One is the hats pictured that go to the Knit A Cap group. I have written about this group in a previous blog. Each year they are mailed to Washington DC and then are put together with other knitters hats and shipped throughout the country to children on Reservations. My sister JE knitted 350 hats for this year alone. I was a little distracted with all the baby knitting and only had 37. I decided that I would put myself on a schedule of a certain number of hats each week for next year. I am not writing it here because I would be mad not to reach my goal. The other package was the baby knitting for Drew that I wrote about in a post last week. I had a flat rate box from the post office I was going to use to mail to Drew. The hats are usually shipped by Fed Ex because they ship for the best price in the large quantities of boxes we usually have. First I went to the post office. Flat rate has always been $8.50 which was a pretty good price for the fact that it can be as heavy as you want for that price. I did include a tracking just because I like to know when stuff arrives. My total, $11.05. Huh? I thought it was $8.50. No $10.35 plus the .70 for tracking. This was for a 2.90lb package. The worker said, well I guess it went up when postage did. You want it back? Now on a day when I was in more of a fighting/arguing mood I would have said heck yeah give it back. But it was already in the pile and I was in a state of shock. So I left complaining to myself. A man in the parking lot looked at me kind of funny and I told him what happened. He just shook his head. I headed to FedEx waiting to see what the big computer paper box was going to cost me to mail. My 4.70 lb box cost $11.56 and that included the tracking. So for 51 cents more I was able to ship 1.80 lb more. Not only that but the worker who took my package was courteous, friendly and I did not have to stand in a line out the door with one worker taking all the packages. Now I am not telling anyone how to ship their packages but it just seems that when we are spending our money to shop/mail things not only are we going to go where the prices are the best but where the employees at least act like they don't mind helping us with our shipping.