Its Snowing.......but this is California....

Well, here I am at our Oakland, California warehouse, and the weather forecasters are predicting snow at sea level, here in the bay area, between late tonight and noon tomorrow.
http://www.boxbros.com/oakland-california
I used to live in the Berkeley area, when I attended school there, back in the late 1970's.....and I recall a lot of different and unusual things about my time in the bay area, but never was there snow unless we drove to Lake Tahoe......

I had the opportunity to do quite a few things during this trip. I attended my first North Bay
CMSA Chapter meeting, which had, as its guest speaker, one of the heads of the Google Ad Program for Moving spoke and it was quite informative, and I even got a free Google Pen.
Ask me, I think it is the most expensive pen I did not directly pay for, but that is a whole other story, for another time.....

I got to also got to break some bread with our entire crew, last night. It was a chance for me
to reconnect with our staff up here, from Kiyoshi Foster who runs our San Francisco location, http://www.boxbros.com/bay-area-california
to Sharie Michalec and her family, as well as Ganzo and his family, too. Dan and his fiance, Carrie and our top comedian and musician extraordinaire, Bill Carter, kept everyone in stitches.

Today I am going to visit our San Francisco location and do so before the snow arrives.....and tonight, I am blessed to be attending a play that my niece has the lead in, up in Martinez. Nothing like a full agenda.

I just wanted to say that we have a great crew up here with so much to look forward to, and I want them all to know that I appreciate their fine work, commitment to customer service, but most of all, that we are one great team and family, all rolled into one-committed to giving our customers the best possible service in the whole wide world.

Three more days till March.......get ready....

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.

Praise for Oakland Box Brothers

This was a pickup for a table we were bringing to Bonhams and Butterfields that eventually made its way to LA for a sale there. The customer felt "this was handled beautifully by Box Bros." We love getting praise, especially for somthing this large and expensive. If we could get every customer who loved our service to praise us on Yelp, we'd be sky high in good reviews.

if this is our new bolg we will make it better then new

Been having trouble with our blog.Do n't really know what's up ? But for sure it will be bigger and better then before . It all started on Monday morning when i was going to post.I could not post, someone took me and Charles of as author's and took the blog down was it spam or was it the last one to administrator it.... i don;t know and we got google all over it so lets sit tight and roll with the new one Robert Goodman