SB
Sequoia Brands
Aug 5, 2026
Walking into UPS these days feels less like visiting a shipping store and more like entering a theme park called Capitalism Land, where every attraction costs extra, and the only ride is disappointment.
I brought in a digital shipping label because it’s 2026 and that’s how normal humans operate. My phone can unlock my car, pay for groceries, and probably pilot a drone if I asked nicely. But UPS? UPS looked at my digital label like I’d handed them a cursed artifact. They still can’t scan it. Not in 2016. Not in 2026. Not even if Bill Gates himself descended from the cloud servers and blessed the barcode.
So they made me email it to them.
Email.
In 2026.
I half expected them to ask me to fax it instead.
Then came the moment that deserves its own Netflix special.
The employee walked over, made three clicks, printed one sheet of paper, and charged me $3.00 for the privilege. The whole thing took eight seconds, which means UPS effectively values those clicks at $1,350 per hour. At that rate, the employee should’ve been wearing a tuxedo and offering me champagne.
And the paper? A single sheet of low‑grade printer paper with barely any ink on it. The actual cost is around 4.5 cents, but UPS charges 25 cents; a 456% markup. I didn’t realize I was buying artisanal, hand‑crafted, ethically sourced paper from the mystical forests of Narnia.
This is a company that made $5.57 billion last year. Billion. With a B. They’re already being paid to ship the item, with profit baked right in. They get tariff refunds they swear they pass on; though those refunds seem to vanish faster than customer service at closing time. Yet somehow, they still need to squeeze quarters out of people returning broken merchandise.
Imagine the family without a printer. They get a defective item; now they have to drive across town, burn gas, lose time, and then get slapped with UPS’s “three clicks cost extra” fee. It’s not customer service; it’s a scavenger hunt where the prize is paying more money.
UPS has turned basic customer service into a pay‑per‑interaction video game.
Every click is a microtransaction.
Every step is DLC.
Every breath is a subscription tier.
If capitalism is going to flex this hard, it should at least stretch first.