Singlespeed & Fixed Gear - $100 to ship a bike!?

i've shipped several bikes before and they've all been around $40-$60. i was just back home visiting my folks and decided to unburden them of the BMX that's been taking up room in their storage unit for the last 5 years. i picked it up, took it to a bike shop and dropped it off to be packed and shipped, and gave them my CC#. they called the next day when i had returned to NYC and told me the bike was packed and would cost $110 to ship!? UPS ground...

does this seem unreasonable to anyone else? i called them right back and told them not to ship it and i'd have someone come by and pick it up and they said it had just gone out the door.

Dunno, is UPS adding a fuel surcharge yet?

I guess I would've first asked how much it was going to cost.

ridiculous, I could ship 60 pounds to nyc via ups ground from sf and it wouldn't cost more than 60 or 70 dollars. that must be a very heavy bmx bike.

there also might be some crazy over-sized box fee involved somewhere. if you have the dimensions you can plug them in at ups.com or fedex.com or dhl.com

I have shipped coast to coast road bikes and mountain bikes for friends that came out to ride and I use FedEx ground and never paid more than $50.

maybe they charged you $50 to pack it, plus $60 to ship? or something ridiculous like that.

yeah, i just shipped a mountain bike the same way from NYC to New Orleans and it was $50. dunno. i asked them to include a UPS receipt with the box so i can check it out. the actual shipping was $110 or so and the packing fee was $25, then they somehow charged me $150 so i'm gonna call em up, but i'm waiting for the bike to arrive. the bike is heavy as hell, but i think the size it the key in shipping cost.

Letting someone else do the packing isn't free..... ;)

i can usually ship a frame via fedex ground coast-to-coast for about $40 if i pack it myself.

UPS Ground? (Shivers.)

yeah, i shoulda packed it myself but i was back home only for a few days. it's an old hoffman ep bmx bike, heavy as hell, sturdy as hell, and already pretty beat up. i'm giving it to a friend who has done a lot of design work for my label so i dont really mind paying, but i do mind getting screwed.

i sent a mtn bike fed ex ground from l.a. to seattle for 18 bbucks.. no wonder ups is goinng out of biz

Keep shopping, even if you only save a few bucks you may save your bike. UPS ground is notorious, their depot handlers are blindfolded and use steel shod jackboots to move the boxes towards the trucks with a series of solid kicks. Then they're loaded onto the truck with a small catapult that fires each box as deep and as high in the 18wheeler as possible. Their drivers at the end CAN read, but are dyslexic to an extreme. They will use your handling instructions as a how not to do it guide while loading the delivery van. and apparantly "Fragile" translates to "Step Here" when read backwards in UPSneeze.

And their insurance.....if you get them to pay you're either real good or one of the ones they pay easy to demonstrate it happens.

I wrench in a shop that charges a 90 flat rate for box and ship -- forty of that covers the boxing labor costs for the shop and fifty of it covers the cost of the UPS standard ground shipping (5-7 days). I'm not sure if there was some mark-up because of a fuel surcharge, or more likely, the shop that you took it to charges their labor rates slightly higher in NYC (I'm in Chicago). It seems pretty standard (although that's not to say that 40 bucks for something that I know takes most competant mechanics aobut fifteen minutes to do) isn't a rip off. In terms of comparison shopping, it seems "reasonable."