We thought maybe we’d do some convenience christmas stuff this year – take unboxed gifts to the mall where we would purchase one last gift, then haul everything to the UPS Store and let them pack it up and ship it out. Everything done in one trip. It was all going so well until the UPS guy took our first (of four) things, said “That’ll be $13.00 packing, and … $63.47 to ship.” The item inside of the box was a single stuffed animal. We looked at our other things, and quickly calculated that our total packaging and shipping costs would come to roughly 1700% more than the items themselves were worth. The UPS guy was very nice about letting us gather our things and slink out of the store.

Luckily, the line at the post office early this morning was very short.