On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 04:22:24 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/16/2016 11:06 AM, Mr Macaw wrote:
On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 05:05:44 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/15/2016 03:57 PM, Mr Macaw wrote:


What is "UPS"? To me that's a device used to prevent power outages to
something important like a computer.

United Parcel Service. They're big brown trucks that bring all the good
things of life to your doorstep.

Oh, don't you have competition there? There is no one main courier here.


There is competition like FedEx that tends to suck. Amazon mostly uses
UPS so I see the guy in brown often. There are local couriers but it
takes a lot of infrastructure to service the US. The lower 48 states
alone are over 3 million square miles versus 94 thousand for the UK.

iirc in 'Small is Beautiful' Schumacher talked about the inefficiencies
of two lorries passing each other on the motorway as each carried
biscuits from their city to the other city where the cities were 100
miles apart. When I was trucking I'd load carpet in LA, take it to
Dalton, GA, load Georgia carpet and take it back to LA. They're 2100
miles apart. The transportation industry in the US is utterly insane. To
succeed as a parcel carrier you need a lot of planes, trucks, and
warehouses.

I assume courier prices are per state over there? For example over here, if I pay to ship a parcel by courier it's the same price to go from anywhere to anywhere in the UK, apart form the North half of Scotland.

--
"I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting." - Ronald Reagan