FedEx

I was a FedEx customer from March 2020 until December 2024. In that time we shipping hundreds of guns to other FFL's across the country. Most of those guns were purchased online in other states and had to be shipped to those customer's FFL for them to fill out paperwork and pick up. We always paid the extra premiums for insurance. In November of 2024 we shipped a Browning FN Safari rifle to a customer's FFL in Florida. The walnut stock was completely broken away from the stock past the wrist. Pieces of walnut stock fell out of the destroyed box at the FFL. Mind you, this rifle was bubble-wrapped in an overstuffed box and inside of another shipping box for extra protection. Some type of heavy equipment (truck, forklift, etc) was used to cause this damage. This wasn't the box falling off of a conveyor or getting tossed around in the truck. And it was obvious when it happened. There was noise and a quick glance around to see if anyone else happened to witness it. But the FedEx employee that did it said nothing and just sent the package down the road. Which is what I have come to expect for the overwhleming majority of FedEx employees, from the top to the bottom. The receiving FFL contacted us and we immediately filed a claim with FedEx. Denied, with no discussion or reasoning. We filed the claim again. Denied, no discussion or reasoning. And again. Denied. Every claim had pictures of the broken stock and heavily damaged shipping boxes. The fourth claim submittal a person from FedEx actually bothered to call us. Like most insurance companies, FedEx must train their claims adjusters to simply deny every claim at least 3 times to frustrate their victims into giving up. He saw the pictures of the obvioulsy damaged box, and the destroyed rifle stock. To his credit he "bumped up" our claim to the "executive review board", whatever that is. He's probably been fired by now for caring about FedEx customers too much. A couple of days go by. A 2nd call from FedEx. This lady from FedEx had the decency to tell me over the phone that the claim was denied, a 4th time, and my FedEx sales rep would contact me in the next 2-3 business days to explain. Then she hung up. There was no opportunity for questions or discussion. Several days go by, and I finally get the call from the FedEx sales rep that had set up my account 4.5 years before this incident. He knew we were a small gun store that would be shipping firearms. We had talked about that at length from the get-go. He told me our claim was being denied because we did not have a "signed firearms shipping agreement" with FedEx. I reminded him that there was no mention of any such requirement for firearms shipments during onboarding when he set our FedEx account up in March 2020. He responded that FedEx had added that to their shipping policies in September of 2021. There was no phone call, email, or letter from FedEx to inform of us this. No blanket communications concerning this major change in policy went out to ANY FedEx customers to my knowledge. He could have been lying, but even my FedEx sales rep claimed to be unaware of this change until FedEx utterly destroyed this rifle stock. I asked him how I was supposed to know about this major change with FedEx not notifying any of its customers. After all, I don't work for FedEx. I wasn't made privy to any of the internal discussions or communications concerning this new requirement. He told me the shipping policy terms and conditions outlined the change, on page 127. That's the little box you check every time you ship something through FedEx. The "click here to agree" box that you HAVE to click to create a shipping label. Their terms and conditions is over 200 pages long. Show me the person that reads all 200 pages every, single, time that they create a shipping label. Better yet, show me the FedEx customer that has EVER read all 200 pages of those terms and conditions. This is what is referred to as an unreasonable expectation. We still needed to ship guns out, insured, so I asked him what the steps were to get a "signed firearms shipping agreement" with FedEx. He asked me how many firearms we shipped in a year. Somewhere between 2 and 6 per week, so around 200-300 or so per year. He told me that the MINIMUM shipping volume to even be eligible for this agreement was $30,000 of shipping business, in firearms alone, each year. At around $40 per gun, that is 750 guns per year. An average of nearly 3 guns, every single business day of the year. There are only a handful of giant online dealers/retailers that ship that many firearms in a year. Distributors/wholesalers, manufacturers, and a few dozen retailers. And those are all large enough companies to be self-insured or have tailor-made, negotiated contractual shipping arrangements with FedEx. There are around 130,000 active FFL's in the US each year. Maybe 1000 between those multi-million and billion dollar companies would be eligible for this agreement. The other 129,000 or so independent gun stores, gunsmith shops, and home-based FFL's can just kick rocks. Firearms are considered "prohibited items" by FedEx without a shipping agreement. They will still gladly accept your shipping insurance premiums though. You pay those insurance premiums to actually provide insurance coverage for your shipments. Instead, FedEx just treats those insurance premiums as tips when FedEx destroys, loses, or steals your firearms shipments. This is what is referred to as insurance fraud, as well as general fraud. You can't ship most long guns through USPS because they only take packages up to a certain size. The only other major nationwide carrier is UPS. There are other options like DHL that are available I guess, but they do not routinely come through our area. That means travelling to one of their locations to drop off shipments or paying additional fees for them to pick packages up for shipment. Extra hassle, time, and cost. I contacted UPS to set up an account. One of the first questions I asked was about firearms shipping and any agreements/conditions they have. Only FFL's can ship firearms with them, and even then UPS also requires a signed firearms shipping agreement. Otherwise, like FedEx, UPS considers firearms as prohibited items. Firearms are ship-at-your-own-risk without a signed agreement. Unlike FedEx though, they did not have a minimum volume requirement for eligility. Or it was a low-enough bar that we easily surpassed the requirement and I have forgotten it. They specified minimum standards for packaging and labeling. FedEx never did. Since January 2025 we have shipped hundreds of firearms with UPS all over the country. So far there have been no claims on lost/stolen or damaged shipments. We have always packed and boxed up every firearm like we would want it to be shipped to us. We don't want to receive a shipping-damaged gun either. No one does. There is more to this story than just my anecdotal experience. Every time we ship a gun we make contact with the receiving FFL. Same if we are having a firearm shipped to us by someone other than a manufacturer or distributor/wholesaler. I have spoken to hundreds of other FFL's since this incident. Every time I ask them these two questions: 1) Do you ship firearms with FedEx?, and 2) If so, do you have a signed firearms shipping agreement with them?. So far, without fail, there have been ZERO dealers that ship guns through FedEx that also have a signed firearms shipping agreement. And 100% of those have been completely unaware of this issue. Most FFL's use FedEx to ship firearms because they are slightly less expensive than UPS. They have been paying the extra $15 to $50 for the extra insurance on the value of the shipments, every shipment. If the average, smaller FFLs like us ships just 25 guns per year, paying an average of $20 each shipment for insurance premiums on top of each shipment, that comes to almost $65 Million in insurance premiums. Not shipping costs. Just the additional insurance premiums alone. Per year. Premiums that FedEx didn't even offer to reimburse on our claim. Premiums that FedEx KNEW they were NEVER going to honor. This was all by design. But they still took the money. And remember, this has been going on since September 2021. Silently. It wouldn't surprise me if the cumulative amount of these fraudulent, worthless insurance premiums paid in by FFLs was somewhere between 500 Million and 1 Billion dollars US over that time. And it is still going on today. FedEx still hasn't sent out any communications about this to their customers. We still have a FedEx account. We just don't use it. My advice if you are ever having a firearm shipped anywhere is to just disregard FedEx as an option altogether. If the shipper will only use FedEx, ask if they have a signed firearms shipping agreement with them. Ask the same for any carrier they plan on using. We reimbursed our customer for the broken rifle. And we still have it. Every time someone asks me about FedEx, I bring it out and tell this story. Mostly this is when a new FedEx driver drops off packages to us. They will ask us if we ship out with FedEx. Unfortunately, most distributors/wholesalers still use FedEx so we see a lot of new delivery drivers. No one seems to last long at FedEx, difficult as that is to believe. I explain to them that I gave $65 to FedEx to destroy this $1000 rifle for me. A rifle that had been built in the 1960's, and couldn't last a week in the hands of FedEx. They took this fine rifle and turned it into a parts gun, at my expense. By design. That was the cost of my education about FedEx and the type of company it is. If this doesn't qualify as being hostile to the 2A community I'm not sure what will. They are subsidizing their profits by defrauding FFLs with worthless insurance premiums. Those costs are always passed on to customers directly or indirectly. This fraud and deception only makes individual firearm ownership more expensive. An ever-rising barrier to entry. FedEx doesn't operate on ethis and morals. They have no value for your inalienable rights, other than what they can profit from them. Which by itself I can understand and accept. They are in business to make a profit. I am too. However they choose to maximize that profit through nefarious and unethical practices and policies through deception and fraud. To me that is a hostile stance.