Sales: truth in weight?

Undoubtedly some sellers inflate the weight to try and make more profit, but I think it's mostly bad estimates. People in general are lousy at estimating size, weight, numbers and time. Unless you have a scale at home, it's easy to be off by a factor of two or three if you're just picking something up and guessing the weight. Most won't bother to take the goods somewhere to get them weighed.

I never had a bathroom scale until recently when my doctor recommended one to keep track of some medical issues. I found a digital one on sale for $10, and it's remarkably accurate. I've shipped a number of things since I got it and it's never been off by more than a pound. If you do a lot of shipping, it would be a cheap way to get accurate weight estimates, even if you don't care what your own weight is.

Like Rlwainwright, when I'm buying something I tend to make offers inclusive of shipping to avoid any problems or hard feelings.

As an aside, 25 years ago when the UPS limit was 50 pounds, I had a UPS driver that could pick up a box and tell whether it was 49 pounds or 51 pounds. Amazing.

David

Seems like there's fodder for a joke to be written here.

My butcher always rests a finger on the scale, perhaps he sells on Audiogon.

I am always up for a good joke and welcome them, but I do not recall seeing a thread about this and felt it was worthing asking. I hope to learn and laugh so hopefully this keeps rolling.

I think some sellers might pack their items with greater care which increases the cost of shipping. It's been my experience that the actual cost of shipping is always higher than the shipper's web site estimates. Personaly I'd rather pay a reasonable amount more for better packing than have to deal with the consequences of "cheap" shipping and especially handling. In the past, I ate some pretty expensive "shipping estimate expenses". Now, that I'm more conservative, any over charges, have been less than $2.00. The cost of packing is usually many times that amount. As both a seller and a buyer, I hate to see new higher than agreed upon expenses. Recently I have tried to include shipping as part of the asking price, but, I wonder if the Audiogon opening listing [item.......price] format might discourages some from clicking on the ad for further investigation, because they assume the price is inflated and don't realize it's the net cost?