Mannequin Madness has a love/hate relationship with most of the major shipping companies. They charge us a surcharge fee for shipping our mannequins. Not because the boxes are heavy or because we are shipping express. It is because of the size of the boxes.

Given that Amazon has trained everyone to expect free shipping, this puts small businesses like me in a jam.

This is especially difficult for us when we are shipping our our used mannequins that we recycled from retailers that are closing.

We sell at a deep discount but due to their size the shipping cost can be the same or more than the purchase price of an item. Try explaining THAT to a customer.

Anyway so we are always shopping around for competitive shipping rates. During COVID19 when our retail store was shut down for almost two months we were able to stay in business because of our online orders.

Fortunately we had switched our shipping account to Fedex earlier this year. They evaluated the rates we had been paying to UPS last year and we were paying ALOT more than if we shipped with Fedex.

Once we told UPS about the competitive rates Fedex was offering us, they attempted to match. But it was too little, too late. And they were not offering any reduction in my past due bills that I had accrued if I stayed with them.

Shortly after we made the decision to leave UPS, we saw this post online about the $1million in grants that Fedex has pledged to assist small businesses. This was just one more confirmation that I made the right choice.

Each grant recipient will receive $5,000, plus a $500 credit from FedEx Office that can be used for printing banners, posters, floor graphics, custom branded boxes, and more.

While we are hopeful that we might be one of the grant recipients, even if we are not we just wanted to give a shout out to Fedex for showing their support for small businesses.If you are a small business owner and not already shipping with Fedex, I encourage you to give them a call.

True no shipping company is perfect and the reason I had stopped using Fedex years ago is because there was WAAY too much damage with our boxes. And their procedure for filing claims was clunky and time consuming.

But they have made changes and they are certainly supporting small businesses now that they are no longer the preferred vendor of Amazon.

Author