★ Tutorial: How the UPS Billing System Works

Shipping and packing is a big part of beer trading. Most of the beer world uses FedEx for their shipments. I use UPS. It’s just a preference of mine. Last night, I received an email from a reader asking me about last year’s eBay debacle and how the stats posted to yesterday’s blog don’t add up. Below are the two graphs they were mentioning and the time line they proposed to me from yesterday’s blog post. Shortly after getting this email, a friend emailed me saying there was a thread basically proving me to be a liar in my post last year.

Anyone looking to read what happened last year from a first-hand account can simply read two posts (1,2).

Graphs in Question:

Timeline:

• Start Trading – Mid-January
• Ramp up trading Mid-February to 1st week of March
• Realize the spending is going out of control and list beers on eBay to pay for financial hardship – Mid-March
• Through end of March – Complete all promised trades using bottles already purchased for trades throughout the end of March including shipping beers to eBay buyers
• End of March – Use eBay money to pay for financial hardship that came suddenly Mid-March
• Mid-April, upon receiving another paycheck, continue to receive trade requests. Can’t say no so do another 12 trades.
• 3rd Week in April, post “no more trades” thread on RateBeer realizing that this obsession with trading and having too many people email me and not being able to say no is getting completely out of control and I feared I’d have to resort to eBay again or something more drastic if I continued accepting all trade offers.
• April 25th, explain the eBay situation on this blog and come clean as to why this all went down

As was explained before, I wasn’t initiating any trades compared to the amount of emails I was getting from strangers asking for Vermont beers. I still get 5 messages a week from strangers asking for Vermont beers and then, it was about 15 per day messaging me. So, at that time, I had a very hard time saying no and that’s why a lot of trades happened.

The UPS Billing System:

UPS Bills weekly. Every Sunday, I’ll get an email with an invoice attached of all shipments that were charged that week. UPS doesn’t bill until 24 hours after delivery of each package so 3-5 days after I drop a box off at UPS does it finally show up in my account.

Accounts in good standing like mine are allowed to go 4-5 weeks between payments before UPS starts emailing you asking for their money. Such is the case with beer trading and why I should have added this in the graph.

In short, the graphs above are showing beers “delivered” and money “paid to UPS” meaning there is some rollover. Usually, I pay UPS every week. In March and April, I paid the 1st week of March and then again in the middle of April for some shipments initiated in March.

Why explaining this is stupid:

This really is the last time I’m explaining this. It’s a new year, Goomba is much happy and healthier now due to the surgery he got and, as many of you can see in the graph, I reduced significantly the amount of trades I was doing after that thread and the eBay business. If anything, any idiot who doesn’t understand that UPS Bills can be paid monthly or understand the timeline that went on can at least realize that following that mess, I slowed down on trading and told more people no who asked to initiate trades.

Actually, when I posted the article yesterday, I was very proud of myself seeing it visually laid out how little I was trading and that I did learn from my lesson and evolved both my drinking style, rating style but most importantly, my trading style.

Because the naysayers are a slim vocal minority, there’s absolutely nothing else that can be said. I’ve written close to 10,000 words on this subject matter and no one that matters cares in the least. Let’s just chock this one up to a group of trolls and move on.

Here are some photos of Goomba after his surgery. Such a cute puppy! There are more photos of the pup on my GF’s blog – http://eeking.tumblr.com.