Prepare yourselves for increased FedEx Ground shipping costs next year… shipping styro via ground is gonna hurt.
http://news.van.fedex.com/fedex-announces-pricing-changes
Effective January 1, 2015, FedEx Ground will apply dimensional weight pricing to all shipments. Currently, FedEx Ground applies dimensional weight pricing only to packages measuring three cubic feet or greater. This change will align the FedEx Ground dimensional weight pricing with FedEx Express by applying it to all packages. Dimensional weight pricing is a common industry practice that sets the transportation price based on package volume—the amount of space a package occupies in relation to its actual weight.
Will this necessarily increase shipping costs? My understanding is that purpose of the rule is to charge more for lower-weight packages that take up a lot of space. Cases of wine shouldn’t have that issue, should they?
Bruce
It makes sense. When I worked for the distribution division of Domino’s Pizza, cubic space was always more of an issue than weight - of course our products weren’t heavy.
But if you ship a box of feathers that takes up the whole truck space, paying only by weight probably doesn’t make sense.
I am surprised they didn’t do this already.
I would think it might be at least a slight increase with styro, as (for instance) a non-insulated cardboard 12-pack takes up perhaps 60% of the space of an equivalent styro 12-pack.
I would guess that wine shipments have a higher weight-to-volume ratio than the average Fed Ex package, despite the styro and cardboard. Just a guess, though.
I heard about this change on the radio a week or so ago and the thrust of the report I heard FedEx was aiming this change at bulky light weight items such as pillows, lounge chair cushions, ect. Of course it is a good excuse to pass on increases across the board.
UPS already does dimensional weight on smaller packages and it has no impact on wine shipments. This doesn’t mean Fedex won’t implement it differently, but I agree with Bruce that that weight of wine makes this an unlikely issue.
UPS has been doing this forever, but it won’t matter for wine, as the weight of wine usually is more than the dim weight. UPS will use this, however, to raise rates, even though FedEx is simply doing what UPS has done forever.
A styro wine box is 18x14x16, which has a dimensional weight of 30 lbs. by the FedEx method (see http://www.fedex.com/be/tools/dimweight.html ). So if the contents weigh more than that, you’re not paying any more. I guess if you’re shipping 9 bottles in a case box it would be more that before, but not dramatically more.
Some retailers recycle their styro by sending out prepaid return labels when the wine ships. I suspect this will be the death of that practice.
Freight charges are bound to continue to go up - just the cost of doing business. What will be interesting to see is how this changes prices for ‘third party shipping companies’ that many wineries use - and how those wineries ‘spin this’ to their customers 
Cheers!