Shipping on a Thursday?

It's always been my policy that I will only ship Mon. - Wed., but I have a potential customer who really wants me to ship on a Thursday because Friday is their day off. Am I being unreasonable, or should I just stick with my policy?

I too only ship Monday through Wednesday, I feel that allows room for at least a one day delay in case something happens in shipping, without risking the package being in transit over a weekend.
The odds are really against anything happening though, so if your customer insists on Thursday shipping you'll in all probability be OK.
However, I would say you are well within your rights to require them to agree that you are not responsible for any problems that might arise if there is a misrouting or something during shipping that causes them to not get there until Monday.

Your policies are still your policies, designed to protect you against potential problems, and there's no reason you should accept any additional risk if you violate them at the insistence of a customer.

Right now, I wouldn't do it. You never know what the hurricane is going to screw up as far as shipping.

Thanks for the input. I explained my reluctance, and offered the customer a few alternatives...we will see if I hear back. I'm not doing any shipping at all this week. We had the hurricane and the RNC (our shipments fly out of Tampa and it's a zoo right now), so I just decided to wait. This week wouldn't have been a good one to ship on a Thursday, anyway, with Monday being a holiday.

I generally ask for shipments to be made on Thursdays, for Friday delivery, as it is a day that I am often available to be home. I've done it dozens of times from all over the country and never had a single issue. Of course, problems are always a possibility, but the way I see it, the small risk of a delay (which still would not likely be lethal if the animal is properly packaged, just stressful and of course to be avoided) is much less significant than the risk of the package sitting in the sun for an extra few hours or for an entire day because I was not free to get it immediately.

Friday delays are really few and far between. Once in a great while we will get a call from a freaked out customer on a Friday, when a package is delayed and gets re-scheduled for a Monday delivery. Sometimes we can get it bumped to Saturday delivery, sometimes not.

Delays happen less than 2% of Thursday for Friday deliveries (Thursday is already a slow day for shipping normally).

So as Clay said, probability is that it will be fine.

However, given the RNC and hurricane concerns in that area, I would say it makes for a compounded unwise choice for this week.

Received a snake today shipped using SYR,on Thursday got her on Friday no problems.. I'm not on east coast though.

I work for an air freight company based in Elkridge MD, not far from BWI. From a business standpoint Friday is no different than Mon thru Thursday as far what your "freight" is doing. It's the weather, or customer error, poor shipping practice and/or materiel, etc that almost always causes the problem. With Fedex staffed sites having Saturday hours having packages held for pickup there adds an extra day to play with should there be a delay.

Just from looking at it "in the business" Fedex really does a good job moving a LOT of "boxes" across the country overnight, coast to coast...

Originally Posted by chris1968

I work for an air freight company based in Elkridge MD, not far from BWI. From a business standpoint Friday is no different than Mon thru Thursday as far what your "freight" is doing. It's the weather, or customer error, poor shipping practice and/or materiel, etc that almost always causes the problem. With Fedex staffed sites having Saturday hours having packages held for pickup there adds an extra day to play with should there be a delay.

Just from looking at it "in the business" Fedex really does a good job moving a LOT of "boxes" across the country overnight, coast to coast...

While I agree most of the time everything goes smoothly mistakes are occasionally made.
Once I sent a snake to a lady that was delivered to the exact address, street name and number, in another town. Fortunately the town was only 45 minutes away from her and she drove there and picked it up from the residence it was delivered to. Presumably the close proximity of the towns resulted in a very similar zip code and a routing mistake was made.

Another time, due to shipper error, I had a package delayed. I wasn't even thinking and ordered some snakes the week of Thanksgiving. They were shipped on Tuesday for Wednesday delivery.
The sender scribbled the zip code and the package was sent to Houston instead.
There was the two holidays then it was the weekend, all the while they sat in Houston. I finally received them on Monday or Tuesday of the following week, I forget which. They were colubrids and survived just fine, but that was a long weekend wondering if they would be alive when they finally got here. I was just glad they got stuck in Houston instead of Alaska.

In the end it doesn't matter whether it's a sender error or carrier error, it still translates to a delay for the customer, which is why I do not ship myself after Wednesdays. I just feel better knowing I have that extra day just in case.