Originally Posted by supcom
How many inches of padding was between the bike and the box? UPS' website clearly recommends 2 inches of foam padding, as I recall. A standard bike box does not have enough room for this. Bike manufacturers don't use enough padding, choosing to accept the risk of damage to save a little shipping cost.
Interesting. During the time that I operated my own bike store I received over 1,000 factory shipped bikes via UPS. That's a pretty good sample size. Care to guess how many damage claims I had? None, Zero, Nada, Not-a-One. It's appearant to me that the majority of shipping woes could be prevented by proper packing. It doesn't sound to me, for example, like the original poster used the plastic axle end caps that bike manufacturers use when packaging bikes.