Dealing with a Large Monopolistic Vendor-Federal Express

I wanted to relate a story of how a customer and a merchant can work together, but at the same time, not work together. I think any number of people can see things differently, but how come large firms can get the details done in order to not only be efficient, but customer centric. Of course, I think it is next to near impossible for monopolistic firms to be able to even be concerned with proper ways to work with their customers. This is but one example.

We at Box Brothers, have been a customer of both of the 2 monopolistic package carrier firms in the United States; United Parcel Service and Federal Express. For 25 and 20 years respectively, we have been a loyal and good payor to these firms. That is not to say that it has always been as smooth as it should have been, but this is a story of how one of those two firms
cannot get its billing corrected to match its actual provision of service.

We were reorganizing our Federal Express Service accounts, for each of our locations, as Federal
Express will not allow us to be just one account, like a law firm with several branch offices. They purposely will not allow that for us, as they do not want to give us an aggregate discount, based upon our total sales, as we sell Federal Express services, as we are classified as a "Commercial
Counter" so that they can make sure my discounts do not get to a point where I can do some harm to their own retail pricing at their kinko's locations. United Parcel Service does the same thing to us, to protect their UPS store chain.

While the point of this piece is not to blast both of these carriers, but the truth is that because they do not have any real competition in the marketplace, they fix the market to control it.
Again, this is why they get to raise their rates beyond the rate of inflation (2-300% of the actual rate) each and every year. They would not be able to do this if they were not legal monopolies, and the bigger question is why we permit it, but that is for another discussion, at another time.

So we rearrange our accounts with Federal Express and we have a new representative that we do like, and he has arranged new account numbers, and such. However, for whatever reason,
there is a disconnect between their billing department and their operations at the local level.

I know this because they seem intent on billing me for weekly service, however, we cannot get
their couriers to show up and collect the packages. It is really a simple matter, but they cannot,
at Federal Express, get this taken care of. Go figure, that the largest air shipping firm in the world can bill me for services not provided and threaten to take me to collection for not paying.
My rep and his boss cannot, for whatever reason, get this fixed.

I am sure there is some logical reason, but I think it is because they are a monopoly and they can
screw up and spend money trying to collect money that was not earned, and it would be so much
easier to just get their service coordinated, as right now, the account is not generating any revenue for them or us. The only effort they have put in is to try to send us to collections for us
not paying the weekly service charges, as that is what our Federal Express representative told us to do.

I bring this up because this such a waste of time and resources and if any business owner say any of this, he would fix it on the spot. I would have to surmise that Federal Express is just acting like a monopolistic carrier, cause that is who they are. Just thought I would let you all know.