subject: Charges For Cancelled Pick Ups: The Reason Why [print this page] Your courier in NJ would like to answer a question a lot of people in the shipping business want answered: why do we charge for a cancelled pick up? After all, it frequently involves no more than crossing a destination off an already crowded calendar; in a way, we are doing couriers a favor by giving them less work.
Well, we do appreciate the work that you give us, and we value your business and continued patronage. And we always want fee free transactions, if at all possible. But sometimes we do charge for a cancellation, and there are several reasons why:
First of all, we may not be the one who is completing your delivery. During busy times, especially the holidays, we frequently farm out our business to smaller delivery companies, getting a less harried courier and messenger service to cover the gap while we keep all the deliveries going smoothly. This messenger may live closer to you; his schedule may be more convenient to yours. This is actually a pretty standard practice; many smaller courier services rely on business like your courier in NJ to send revenue their way in this manner.
This independent contractor in your delivery may have your shipment as one of the few he has to do that particular day (lucky him); cancellation of that order means lost revenue for him, however, which would be far less detrimental to a larger firm. That is why we contract out for the amount of delivery no matter what, to guarantee that this smaller courier gets both his fuel and his driving costs covered.
Also, we may have a schedule that day that is pretty tight, depending on a chain of shipments for us to complete. Your cancellation may throw off the schedule enough that we need to redo or realign deliveries (that is also an occasion when we farm out our orders).
Now, there is a way to avoid this cancellation surcharge: call in advance, a day or more. Usually, a one day gap between cancellation and delivery will avoid a fee; also, a call with an even longer gap, such as a week (if you know about the need to cancel that far in advance) is better. We can practically guarantee no fee in those circumstances.
In any event, we try to keep our surcharge small (just to cover basic costs) because we value you as a customer, and hope you will understand our need for a cancellation charge.
