Quote:
Originally Posted by RidgeTop Reptiles
Actually they are making money with SYR and RE... because only a few select have been grandfathered in to ship snakes with UPS.... so by allowing SYR and RE to ship snakes.. they are improving their bottom line.
What I dont get is why they are so against it. They are alienating themselves from a whole industry and giving it all to FedEx. From a business standpoint... that has got to be the dumbest move ever.
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I work for UPS in operations management at the main air hub (WorldPort) here in Louisville. I'd guess that at least 80 to 90 percent of the overnight reptile shipments tendered to UPS come through here each night along with over a million other packages.
I'm not going to pretend to know what the holdup is with granting RE or SYR the waivers to ship snakes but I wouldn't be in the least surprised to find out that it's simply because the company doesn't WANT to handle them. I know that most of the people here want nothing to do with them.
I've been with UPS for fourteen years and in that time I personally have witnessed over a dozen incidents involving snakes escaping from their boxes. Most of the time it's due to improper packaging, but that's neither here nor there. On more than one of those occasions an injury to an employee has resulted, either from a bite or from them being startled and then hurt in their effort to get away from the snake. I myself was bitten while trying to recapture several rough green snakes that had escaped their enclosure and the company wanted to send me to the emergency care center.
Injuries in the workplace are very expensive in terms of both medical treatment and in the time it takes to process all the paperwork required, not to mention the loss of productivity of the employee and the strike against the company as an OSHA recordable injury.
Boxes are loaded into shipping containers which are then loaded onto the aircraft. Once the plane gets to our hub or another gateway's hub the containers are removed and are put up in an unload area in the hub. A few weeks back a container was spotted up on an unload lane here and when the employee opened the door he was greeted by an 11 foot Sulawesi retic that had escaped. Imagine the disruption that caused. Time is money and in the overnight shipping business minutes lost mean a lot of money. When you have an entire area closed down because employees are afraid to go near an escaped snake the result is like ripples in a pond: the processing of the packages is delayed, which means that the reloading of the outbound aircraft is delayed, which causes potential service failures and increased airport fees when the planes do not leave on time.
If a lizard gets loose everybody gathers around and says, "Oh look, isn't he cute?" and then goes back to work. If a tarantula or scorpion escapes someone steps on it and work resumes without too much fanfare. If a snake meanders out of its box people run screaming in terror.
I would guess that part of the problem might be that SYR and RE are not the actual "known shippers" of the snakes, i.e., a responsible entity. Instead, any Tom, Dick or dumbass off the street can ship through them with no regard to common sense or proper packaging. Just read some of the horror stories here on the BOI.
Again, these are just some random thoughts I came up with while reading this thread, the truth may be a world apart from this.
And what happened to that beautiful 11 foot Sulawesi retic a few weeks ago? He's now dead, thanks to an uncaring owner who shipped it in a bare box with no internal containment. Hope he's proud of himself.