the shipping department blues

Mail order means shipping. Not necessarily by mail, but for a business like ours, it has been the best overall method. The great majority of the boxes we send out into the world are small to medium size, and the postal service provides boxes for FREE as long as we use them to ship by priority mail. We use the USPS Click and Ship service, which means I make and pay for the labels online, print them myself, apply them to the box and haul everything to the post office. I could have them all picked up at the shop, but by the time I am done picking and packing and labeling, I am ready to get away from the table and the computer and drive the almost 2 miles to town and see what else is going on in the world. Not that there is much in the tiny town of Harper, but there is a new thrift store run by the library, and there is the library if I need something to read, and the bank and the feed store and any local gossip that might be floating around, not that I am interested in anything like that, of course.

WE get suggestions and complaints from time to time about our shipping methods. Our shopping cart is a rather simple affair--we chose it for that reason and also because it was relatively inexpensive, and we always try to keep our overhead down as that means our prices can stay at a reasonable level. Some shopping carts give you a choice between UPS, Fedex, USPS, and all the different speeds of delivery thereof. Ours could give you more choices, but we do not offer them for a very simple reason. Our shipping department is a one person operation and that is me. We have thought about employees, but we have been there done that with previous business ventures, and this time we'd like to keep it just the two of us. There is a comment box in the shopping cart, and when someone wants something fast or shipped by UPS, they usually let us know there and then we do our best to comply.

In fact, doing our best pretty well sums up what we try to do everyday with Duckworks. WE always feel bad when we disappoint, but too much stress is bad for your health, so we try to keep it all in perspective. Sounds like Duckwords, I'd better quit while I am ahead. More about this later.