All joking aside, no one at UPS breaks packages on purpose. They don't have time. The poor kids that load the trailers get paid about 10 bucks an hour and have to load 1200 to 1500 pieces an hour, for a 3.5 hour shift. This isn't 1200 envelopes. It's dorm fridges, window A/C units, computers. If you can't put one end of the package on one chair and the other end on another chair, then stand in the middle, it's not packed well enough. The boxes come down a belt, the loader builds a wall, and keeps moving back, as they go. The walls are ten feet high. If the wall is three feet high when your rifle comes down the belt, it gets laid across several packages. If the boxes at the muzzle and butt stock are very stiff and strong, and the ones in the middle are soft and floppy, you have a week spot in the middle. Then you have seven more feet of packages that get stacked on top of your rifle. We have a 70 pound weight limit that goes into the general load. If ten 70 pound boxes come down the belt they get stacked on that wall, fast. You don't get extra credit, or time, to load a heavy box. Then our overall weight limit is 150 pounds. Those boxes get stacked at the end of the trailer and get loaded last. So, if you were unlucky, and your box was in the last wall, you might get a 150 pound box on it. Me being a gun guy, the only boxes I knew were guns were Remington, because they still used green boxes with big Remington script, and H&K MP5's going to the FBI. The H&K's were marked MP5, 5 units per box. Always plan on your box being in the middle of the load with week, soft boxes under it. Only a couple percent are loaded flat on the bottom, and a couple percent on top, so your's is in the middle.Don't bother with "Top Load Only", the loaders check the zip to make sure the package is on the right trailer and that's it. No time to read notes, look at pictures on the box. We get loads in from Purina with 69 pound boxes of dog food. When that trailer hits the door, you just groan. It all gets resorted to other trailers. If you get 200 of those boxes coming down your belt the very last thing you think about is, "wow, I wonder if this skinny floppy box has a gun in it". When Gateway Computers came out with their black and white cow boxes, they had a commercial on TV, with a box dropping from above the commentator. He said something like, "we don't drop our boxes, but we could". If you can't drop it from shoulder high, or sit on it resting on two chairs, it's not packed well enough. You can say that's stupid, but that's the way it is, and it's not going to change. If you want to ship it in a light weight carton, ship it Next Day Air, they don't go in trailers. They get shipped in Igloos that fit in the planes, so not very much stacked on top. If you don't want to pay for NDA, build a 2X4 frame for it. Unfortunately this only works for the shipper. When your the receiver, you are at the whim of a cheap skate shipper, Joe.
