Glad mine came thru Ceva Freight with its own palletAmpeg knows how to box an SVT, I'll tell you that! Double boxed, lots of thick foam under, over, and around it.
It's not only about how the item is boxed. It's also about how the item is handled.
Maybe it's not fair to blame the guy who packaged the amp, when the real problem is how the package was mishandled.
I have had items shipped to me using bona fide freight services, where the merchandise is shipped on it's own pallet. With a freight service weight is not an issue when it comes to the safety of your package. Freight services use people with lifting machinery to lift heavy objects, and someone takes individualized effort to handle your specific pallet with a forklift. It always stays upright and it only gets handled / unloaded a minimum number of times, as the pallet is transported from one truck to another. Whenever it's being moved, the move is being performed by a human. There's a reason that freight service costs as much as it does. It's the safest way to move a package on a truck and you pay for that.
FedEx and UPS are the low cost providers. There is no real care that's afforded to your package. Packages that travel through these carriers have a weight limit placed on them because they're not being given individualized attention by people with lifting equipment. At UPS and FedEx much of the centralized package sorting at hubs is robotic. The box stops under a scanner for bar code reading and sorting to it's final destination. If the bar code isn't right side up, automated machinery flips your package and re-scans it, and keeps repeating the process until the bar code has been read. Then the package takes a big slide down a chute as it's sorted to it's final destination. All too often, heavy packages fall off of the conveyor system and hit the ground. When a human does handle your package, it's likely to be dropped when it weighs over 70 lb, because that's the upper limit on how packages are handled at places like UPS. If a package weighs 70 lb it gets tagged with special yellow-black tags to let the handler know that special lifting equipment is required. But UPS guys are so pressed for time that they often ignore the package handling warnings.
One of my SVTs looked like it did fine in transit until the final moment of delivery, when the UPS guy leaned over the hand truck and tilted it over to drop the box on my doorstep. He was too hurried and too lazy to do anything else. It landed with a bang as the box slapped the concrete. A freight service would have used a forklift to handle a palletized box.
It's important to understand that an SVT is a heavy enough item where you need to consider using different shipping methods. It shouldn't be shipped by a carrier whose system is optimized for handling shoeboxes.
It's important to bear in mind that people who ship extremely heavy items via FedEx and UPS are doing so because they want to choose the low cost provider. Don't be surprised when low cost gets you marginal quality. It shouldn't come as a surprise when something goes wrong that would have been avoidable if a better shipping service had been used.
I used to be the same way -- I thought of UPS and Fedex for everything -- but I've just learned too many lessons the hard way.
