(Dealing with) Consolidated Shipments

I was going to wait for the end of my shipping adventure to post information but I have now learned enough that I feel there is something useful to say. The player on the U.S. end is Republic Shipping Consolidators, Inc. I will talk about them and what I will call "stupid U.S. vendors".

I have been working with Gabriel at Republic. That's the good part of the story. They will accept shipments from multiple vendors, store them in their Miami warehouse and keep you up to date. When everything is ready, they forward everything. We are still at the "getting everything there" stage.

This order is about 1500 lbs., maybe 85 cu. ft. and about $9000 of "stuff". Most is now there. One vendor was amazing, Durotech who manufactures Airlessco airless sprayers. They got me all the right paperwork, packed stuff well, ...

A few others have been "not bad". That means they did at least send me UPS tracking information and it appears things were packed ok. Then we get to the two big ones: Harbor Freight Tool and Northern Tool.

I have now been told that Northern packs poorly such that things are damaged before they get to the freight forwarder. That's part of the problem. The other is that they broke up the order into eight separate shipments. They sent me a list of what was in each with a weight. Unfortunately, the weights didn't correspond with the warehouse weights at Republic. Republic will send me the tracking numbers and I can sort that one out.

The final disaster is Harbor Freight. They just said "your order was shipped". Republic now has seven separate shipments consisting of 12 cartons. I have no information as to how many shipments or cartons there should be in the order. Even if I did know that was the correct number, I need to know what is in each box for the Bill of Lading information. So, basically, Harbor Freight sucks.

We will work this out and I feel good about working with Republic. But, it is clear there is another level of "adventure" involved here.