Richard has a warning for the Consumerist community: he writes that if you mess up a zip code on an overnight UPS package, they will charge you an $11 “address adjustment” fee to fix it. Excessive? Richard thought so, and UPS was nice enough to waive it when he asked.

Just a warning out there to UPS users: I recently sent a package overnight via UPS and accidentally wrote the wrong zip code on the “To” address (xxx20 rather than xxx14). The shipment was billed to the receiver’s UPS account, and I filled out the shipping document at the local UPS store (and not online through my own shippers account), so you can imagine my surprise when the day after the package was delivered I received an email invoice on my own account from UPS for a charge of $11 for an “address adjustment.”

I called and was told that I had written the wrong zip code and that it was a legitimate charge, and that even though the shipment was charged to the receiver using their account number, any adjustments are charged to the shipper, but after complaining that $11 was pretty steep, that risk of such a charge was not mentioned on the actually shipping document (only, apparently, on the UPS website), and that I found it troubling that even though my own account number was nowhere on the shipping document I filled out, they found it within their rights to look me up in their computer, find that I had my own UPS account, and felt free to go ahead and charge the credit card account associated with that account, they gave me a one-time waiver, but warned that my account now would have a note in it that I had used my one “get-out-fee-free” card and would not get to do so again.

I always thought that the reason they asked for your phone number on the shippers info section was for this very reason–so they could call you if there was a problem like this.

I freely admit that I got the zip code wrong, but $11 seems pretty steep.

The logistics of sending an overnight package make it difficult to take the time out to call the sender–but an $11 fee is indeed pretty steep for an address change.

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