Thanks to a Stupid FedEx Employee and an Only Slightly Less Stupid Writer, We Got the Child Seat Thing (Sort of) Handled

A few weeks ago, I told you that I had found the winner of my impromptu let’s-give-away-a-child-seat competition. If you are possessed of an outstanding memory, you will recall that the child seat I was giving away happened to be my son’s Britax Pinnacle 90. If you also happen to know your child seats backwards and forwards (because some are rear facing — get it?) you will note that the child seat in this photo is actually a Britax Boulevard, not a Pinnacle.

What happened and why? Well, it started with a FedEx clerk who was just bright enough to poke buttons on a computer, but no brighter than that…

“It doesn’t really matter, I just want it shipped.”

“Alright then… the total is $371.20.”

“Hold on a minute. I guess it matters after all.”

Two weeks ago I went to my local “FedEx Office” to ship my son’s Britax Pinnacle to its new owner. I didn’t have a box for the child seat, largely because my wife had recently thrown away about thirty cardboard boxes of various sizes I’d had stuffed in the basement for future eBay sales. She pointed out that I was selling items at the rate of one a month and that most of the things I was selling fit in a Priority Mail six-by-nine. So she had a point. Nevertheless, the amplifier box she pitched would have fit the admittedly massive Pinnacle seat very well. I have not yet forgiven her for that.

I did expect, however, that the FedEx store would be able to find a box that fits a child seat. After all, they claim to be able to ship everything from bicycles to furniture. Yet when I got there I had to sit through a twenty-three-minute process in which the woman behind the counter called multiple stores to find exactly the right box. Finally I was told that the box would, in a case of at least mild irony, be shipped to the FedEx store within two days. At that point I was ready to pay whatever they asked, assuming that it would be even vaguely reasonable. It wasn’t.

There is no reason that FedEx should charge $371.20 to ship a child seat across a grand total of three states, but my helpful clerk was experiencing a decided inability to step outside her unconscious process and apply conscious thought. The machine said it was $371.20; therefore that’s what it was. Never mind the fact that Amazon ships child seats for free and that most stores ship them for no more than $29.99. Never mind the fact that it cost me something like $28 to ship two 17-inch car wheels in a common box to California a while back. She wasn’t interested in examining whatever underlying assumptions were resulting in the ridiculous price.

So I went back home and thought about different options. I sat down to re-read the original email from the woman who had “won” our competition, trying to figure out if she was near a racetrack or any place that I might be traveling in the near future. It was then I realized something that should have been obvious to me from the beginning: her son was just short of two years old, which meant that he was too small for the Pinnacle. Had I sent her the seat as I’d planned, it would have been of no use to her.

To make a long story short, I bought a new Britax Boulevard for her son and it’s working great. But while that purchase might solve her problem, it doesn’t solve mine, to wit: I still need to get rid of this child seat. Guess I’ll go read all the original emails again — and maybe I’ll try a different FedEx store next time.