Skip to main content

REVIEW – NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING

For those of you who haven't been following, a brief recap is in order.

Cathey and I are moving...have moved...from the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania to Quarante in the Languedoc region of southern France. Several months before our planned move, I began researching international shipping companies online. I checked out their websites, read customer reviews, and eventually contacted several to seek quotes. In the end, I chose NewYork International Shipping for several reasons. Their reviews were no better or worse than any of the others with the exception that their agent in France was mentioned favorably in reviews a couple of times. (People either loved or hated their shippers. No middle ground.) Their quote was in line with the others that I solicited but their quote included packing our stuff for us while each of the others required us to do the packing ourselves. And NYINTSHIP (their own shorthand) answered my email and phone questions promptly and reasonably.

We scheduled the packers in for mid March. NYINTSHIP had told us that the move would take from eight to ten weeks, door to door, with the usual caveats about the vagaries of timing. Since Cathey and I had tickets for a mid April flight, we figured that living for a month without the bulk of our stuff in the States would balance out living for a month out of our suitcases in France while we waited for our stuff to arrive...hopefully in mid May.

As mid March approached, several glitches cropped up.
  • NYINTSHIP advertised that they accepted PayPal, so I sent the deposit through my PayPal account. What I hadn't been told was that the PayPal fee would be deducted. I lost about $50. I found that a bit confusing. If I'd used a credit card, they would have had to eat a fee, wouldn't they? Still, I decided that the $50 was not worth fighting over in the grand scheme of things. I needed their good will more than I needed the $50.
  • The packing and pickup was rescheduled twice. I can't really blame NYINTSHIP for that. The winter of 2013/14 in the American Northeast was the winter from Hell with significant snows every few days. I could understand the nightmare of scheduling under those circumstances.
  • The final invoice was about 50% higher than the initial quote. Again, I don't blame NYINTSHIP. I'm not a professional estimator and we decided to ship much more than we initially contemplated. We added a sofa to our relatively small load, for instance, the largest piece that we shipped by far. As a result, even though I inserted an extra 10% of wiggle room into my initial list of items to be shipped, the sticker still shocked me.
  • Communication broke down fairly rapidly after the sale was closed. I received a receipt for our deposit but I had to ask for receipts for our two subsequent payments. I had to ask for projected date of shipping and had to ask for projected date of delivery. Everyone that I spoke with was polite and responsive. Emails were answered promptly. But I had to ask.
  • Our stuff arrived on June 24th, nearly twelve weeks after pickup, outside the eight to ten week estimate. Cathey was frazzled by that time and when Cathey is frazzled, I am frazzled. But our stuff did arrive. The guys lugged it from their truck to the first or second floor as we directed. And they had to park 50 meters away from the front door because we live on a pedestrian street that trucks can't enter. We shipped 91 pieces (a sofa counts as one piece) and we received 91 pieces.
  • It's taken us a couple of days to unpack and unwrap. The Wedgwood is intact. None of the other china, pottery, or glassware arrived chipped, cracked or broken and there's plenty of china, pottery, and glassware. None of our clothing or linens have become water-stained or bug infested. The ladder back of one chair is cracked, easily glued and so far within the insurance deductible that it's not worth reporting.
Given all of that, you would think that I give New York International Shipping low marks, that I'd warn you away from them. Not so. I recommend them. I'll tell you why.

Several million containers enter and leave the Port of New York annually. Our stuff occupied a small percentage of one of those containers. The fact that any shipment at all is delivered to its proper destination thousands of miles away, reasonably intact and within a reasonable period of time, is a miracle of Biblical proportions. That shippers who handle millions of dollars worth of cargo every year should be courteous when answering the questions of a tyro like me who will make minimal use their services once in a lifetime is a second miracle. And the container in which our stuff was packed didn't fall off the deck and into the Atlantic. Miracle number three. In the face of the odds, I have nothing to complain about.

So I grade New York International Shipping a solid B.
I'd use them again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

JOE WALSH, RONSTADT, MEEZERS AND MORE - #19

    MEMORABLE CONCERTS - PART 1 I first saw Linda Ronstadt in concert in about 1973 in a little venue in Atlanta called the Great Southeast Music Emporium. I have since seen on various websites that the capacity of the venue was about 540 people. It seemed smaller, a converted shopping center movie house that sold beer by the bucket. Literally. Little metal buckets. Search the name and read about the place. By the time that Cathey and I went to concerts there, some of the acts that they were booking went on to the big time. One such was Linda Ronstadt. Imagine seeing Linda up close and personal in such a small venue, blue jeans and bare feet and with a band that would become the Eagles backing her. Imagine that it's the early show and she's just hit town and she's kinda tired so it's mostly ballads. That voice just a few feet away. Singing love and loss right at you. And imagine, when the show is over, that management comes out and says that, since the second show wasn&

IT'S ME AGAIN - SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE CORRUPTION OF DISCOURSE

Drafted months ago. I think I'm going to start writing again.       What happened? On the evening news fifty years ago, like clockwork, millions of folks would watch Walter Cronkite describe daring flights in space while raptly watching grainy video that we would only see once. No VCRs. No YouTube. Perhaps more importantly than his space exploration commentary, Walter's grainy video described the moral complexities of the war in Vietnam. Whether or not we considered either or both of those endeavors noble, we trusted Walter's presentation. He showed us pictures and commented on them truthfully, so we believed. There were other guys sitting in the chairs in the other two networks. They seemed like nice guys. But Walter was the standard, at least in our house. There were the three national networks with just one or two independent stations serious enough to consider in the major media markets back in those days. More locally produced radio and more local, often daily newspape

Kreuz Market vs. Smitty’s Market: Texas Barbecue in Lockhart

I was born and raised in New Jersey. I didn’t taste Texas barbecue until I was twenty-two years old. What the hell do I know about barbecue? And what could I add to the millions of words that have been written on the subject? Well, I know a bit about food. I’ve managed to check out a few of the finer joints in Texas – Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in Dallas, Joe Cotton’s in Robstown before the fire, the dear departed Williams Smokehouse in Houston, and the incomparable New Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville . So I can speak from a reasonably wide experience. This will not be a comprehensive discussion of the relative merits of Texas barbecue as opposed to the fare available in places like Memphis or the Carolinas. It’s simply a take on our recent visits to Lockhart and the relative merits of Smitty’s versus Kreuz from our point of view. I’ll get all over academic in a later post. On our way out to the ranch in Crystal City, we stopped at Smitty’s. You have to look