Being in the delivery business, I can tell you what you already knew. It's a scam, more accurately, a profit centre.
Part of me says why not, after all, these aren't charities you're dealing with, then the other part rails at the fact that customers are heavily overcharged for a part of the sales process which has to be undertaken anyway & confers no product benefit to the end user.
My company deals in heavy distribution & 26 pallets at a time is our stock in trade. That level of carriage would be something in the order of 4000 retail boxed external hard drives, for the sake of argument, assuming around 160/pallet right? On a good day, we would charge in the region of £380 for London to Manchester. The carriage therefore works out around 9.5 pence per unit shipped.
All sorts of factors will drive that rate up or down, but whichever way you cut it, it is not expensive on an item that will retail in excess of £50.
Final delivery carriers I.e. parcel co's. have different economics however. The main contention they have to deal with is volume. To be successful in the parcel market, you absolutely must have a vast central, automated sorting hub that takes in deliveries through the 2nd half of the day, sorts them into geographical areas & sends them back out on lorries for transhipment onto vans & final delivery the following day.
That central hub is a financial beast that has to be fed constantly. The whole thing depends on that. Typically, a parcel company will look to make fractions of a penny on a parcel. Thus, someone like play/amazon/e-buyer etc. will be getting deals in the sub £3/parcel range in the UK.
Think on that next time £9.99 delivery is added to the shiny new box you just ordered.
Last edited by Sprogget; 27th Jul 2009 at 14:33.