Newsorter,
I have some experience in this arena. I live east of Albany, NY in the hills, so not terribly far from you, so these figures I'll give you for reference would be fairly accurate for you was well. I ship LTL pallets to Boardsort a few times a year, usually junky stuff (small socket MB's, laptops, lower value stuff). I just recently shipped a pallet weighing in a at 800 pounds or so and it cost roughly $300 bucks, most of that cost being because it was picked up at my father's residence (he has a bigger garage space). If it were possible for you to assemble and ready the pallet where the trucking company can load from a dock, the shipping charges would be less than half of that, I believe I saw a price of $120 bucks for the same pallet of stuff. Now, the difference in price between an 800 pound shipment and a 1200 pound shipment was non-existent, however when you are getting a quote, you have to be very accurate on the weight of the pallet, even overshoot, as a fee will be incurred if they find out it weighs more. If you only have 300 pounds of stuff, the shipment may be cheaper, I'm not sure. This is if you are using a standard 48x40 pallet. I have shopped my ass off trying to get pallets to Ohio as cheaply as possible, and the best deals come from Freightquote.com You have to make sure when selecting a carrier, that they do residential pickup. They aren't very forthcoming with that info on the site, so you may have to call around and ask. I can tell you XPO Logistics does residential pickup and A. Duie Pyle does not (I found this out the hard way recently). Also, youre better off jamming all of your stuff onto the same skid (for profit reasons) and also because, like I said, the cost to ship probably won't change, whether youre shipping 300 pounds or 500 pounds. Just be accurate on your dimensions and weight.
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