Otherbarry

UPS/FedEx has sucked for a while now, rarely are they cheaper than USPS

Well yeah, USPS should be cheaper. They tend to get bailout money from the U.S. government due to operating at a loss e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billion-postal-service-relief-bill-2022-03-08 , UPS/FedEx on the other hand just raise their rates / change services to keep their shareholders happy.

In theory if the USPS was allowed to increase rates as much as any private company then they would be as expensive, if not more, vs UPS/FedEx.

That sounds pretty typical, didn’t know they used to not charge for a residential pickup.

To be fair businesses that have a FedEx / UPS account and have regularly scheduled pickups do get charged for that. It’s one of the items buried in the bills you get from them every week (can’t remember offhand if the pickup fee is a weekly or monthly charge). Maybe the high volume businesses get it for free, not too sure.

I’d expect USPS to do the same but don’t have any direct experience with their billing.

Where I work we have a similar situation, we sometimes have prepaid FedEx labels but no regular FedEx pickup so that has to be arranged differently on our end. We could pay FedEx their pickup fee if we wanted but we don’t ship FedEx every day so it’s kind of a waste of money, and the FedEx drivers would be coming and going without picking anything up most days.

the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.

Yeah don’t bother doing that. All that will accomplish is them gathering even more information on you, they rarely/never actually unlock your account & let you use it again. You’ve been permanently blacklisted on their service, just move on. And honestly you don’t need Paypal anyway.

Similar stupid thing happened to me too I think about 10-15 years ago, I was using virtual credit card numbers that my credit card company was generating for me & Paypal thought that was suspicious enough to close my account & permanently blacklist me LOL.

Fun fact: I did learn over the years that I can temporarily create new Paypal account(s) as long as I don’t use the same mailing/billing addresses or credit cards/bank accounts. But then it’s just a waiting game, they usually figure it out eventually and close the Paypal account yet again.