Just got off the phone with doug and he said he talked to the folks at DHL & Fedex...so far, Fedex is charging a lot more than DHL but he thinks Fedex got the Iraq contract (which is why they can charge more?) and DHL may only be shipping to Bagdad & Kuwait city...As far as the boxes going to Iraq, I don't know where the Anaconda base is, if it's in Bagdad.. then we might be ok?! but the Kuwait boxes, we know, we can get there via DHL.
but as far as we can tell, the shipping discount we got last year was $22 for 30 lbs and we ended up spending a little over $300 on shipping all the boxes.
This year, DHL's deal is $22 for 10 lbs, in which case, we're going to end up paying more overall for shipping (even though we have fewer boxes, they're just as heavy).
He's going to check out the possibility of sending them the APO route if that'll save us the extra $$ because unfortunately, we only have about $300 left over for shipping and doug figures at the DHL rate, it'll cost us about $500 to ship them since we're not getting the same deal as last year
(we were really counting on that deal).
you'd think these shipping companies would be all gung-ho for citizens to send packages over to the troops and we're just not getting that feeling. granted, they have to make money too, but if they even donated some of it, it wouldn't hurt their bottom line because they could write off the donations considering how large a company they are...then again, Doug and I could probably write it off too, but our bottom line isn't nearly as large as DHL's is, so i really don't know if we'd get out of it what we put into it - tax wise...
If the APO route isn't going to work, we may be asking for a few more donations to help offset the cost of getting the boxes over there... and then, lesson learned - we'll check out shipping prices before we do another Operation Care Pack next year. If shipping charges continue to go up &/or our discounts continue to deteriorate, we might not be able to do OCP next year because we want most if not all of your donations to go to goodies, not shipping.
but anyways, there's the newest scoop!
but as far as we can tell, the shipping discount we got last year was $22 for 30 lbs and we ended up spending a little over $300 on shipping all the boxes.
This year, DHL's deal is $22 for 10 lbs, in which case, we're going to end up paying more overall for shipping (even though we have fewer boxes, they're just as heavy).
He's going to check out the possibility of sending them the APO route if that'll save us the extra $$ because unfortunately, we only have about $300 left over for shipping and doug figures at the DHL rate, it'll cost us about $500 to ship them since we're not getting the same deal as last year
you'd think these shipping companies would be all gung-ho for citizens to send packages over to the troops and we're just not getting that feeling. granted, they have to make money too, but if they even donated some of it, it wouldn't hurt their bottom line because they could write off the donations considering how large a company they are...then again, Doug and I could probably write it off too, but our bottom line isn't nearly as large as DHL's is, so i really don't know if we'd get out of it what we put into it - tax wise...
If the APO route isn't going to work, we may be asking for a few more donations to help offset the cost of getting the boxes over there... and then, lesson learned - we'll check out shipping prices before we do another Operation Care Pack next year. If shipping charges continue to go up &/or our discounts continue to deteriorate, we might not be able to do OCP next year because we want most if not all of your donations to go to goodies, not shipping.
but anyways, there's the newest scoop!
