TV shipping is tough. You’re dealing with a very expensive item that’s also very fragile, and you’re trying to move it from one place to the next without bumping, dropping, flipping, hurting, shattering, or destroying it. There are ways to ship your television. LTL is not one of them.
When I recently bought a new TV, I got nervous just taking it back to my apartment from the Best Buy parking lot. This was five miles max. Every bump in the road, every stop at a red light, I had one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the television box in the back seat.
The truth is that TV shipping is a specialized art form, one practiced by certain people, but not one that you should use LTL carriers or brokers for. Here’s some easy reasons why you shouldn’t use LTL for TV shipping.
The Life of an LTL Shipment
A standard LTL shipment is picked up off a dock, and moved to the back of a truck. That truck then drives around town and picks up a bunch of other freight. At the end of the day, it unloads all the freight on to another dock at the freight terminal.
The next morning, the shipment is loaded on to another truck, and driven to another terminal, to be unloaded again. This happens over and over again, until the freight is delivered. Does this sound like the sort of handling appropriate for TV shipping? No! Forklifts and warehouses and shipping docks? Of course not!
The Insurance for TV Shipping
Freight insurance is great for an enormous amount of items and situations. TV shipping is not one of them. The chances of getting a full payout on a damaged television are slim to none. The liability is too high. The chance of damage is too great.
Even if you pay for additional insurance, chances are you won’t get all your money back. Then you’re out the cost of the television (or at the very least the repairs), as well as the upfront cost of the insurance.
The Freight Class
Generally speaking, freight class is determined by an item’s “shipability.” The higher the freight class, the more expensive it is to ship. Even though more and more freight classes are being determined by density, televisions are always going to fetch a high freight class, and that leads to higher freight quotes. Nobody likes higher freight quotes.
When you pair high rates with a high chance of damage, you see why its so dangerous to ship a television.
Overall, LTL is great for shipping a lot of things. Engine shipping? Perfect. But TV shipping is not good for LTL. There are too many chances for damage, and not enough savings in freight quotes. Hopefully this blog showed why you shouldn’t use LTL for TV shipping, and if it’s imperative to ship a television you should look for means outside of less than truckload.