@JBK said:
Off the top of my head I can't think of any insurance situation where you are allowed to set your own valuation.
You can't insure for sentimental value, for example. You certainly can't insure for nonexistent value.
The only case that comes to mind that remotely resembles your scenario is life insurance. But that is quite a different situation.
How so? In life insurance both sides make a bet that you will or will not die during the term and how much the life is worth. At the post office, you and USPS decide how much the box is worth in case they fail to deliver it.
You buy a $1M policy for yourself and then after you die, if you were the USPS they would come back and say that your life wasn't worth that much because you're just an unemployed bum, here's $100k go away even though you paid a premium for $1M coverage. Perfect analogy.
Life insurance is not property insurance. The value of your life is not part of the calculation for either party. It is strictly actuarial.
Shipping insurance is not property insurance either. Most of the claims are probably 100% loss, not for partial loss and repairs. There's no reason why the rates would be set by anything other than statistics. Although government entities never cease to surprise me in their ineptitude, I would guess their goal is that knowing the average claim rate and the average claim size, they seek to collect 110-120 claim's worth of premiums for every 100 claims they pay out (although perhaps as a govt entity their goal is just to break even). There is no need to assess actual loss as the customer has paid his premium proportional to the coverage amount. It wouldn't surprise me if the PO spends as much money trying to pay less on claims and fighting claims than if they just paid the total coverage amount. There is no angle to take advantage of, you'd go broke insuring empty boxes for large amounts hoping to cash in on an insurance claim.
Otherwise if we as customers are going to allow retroactive modification of the terms, they really should allow us PCGS customers to request insurance refunds. We ship what we think is $10k of coins to PCGS. They all come back details valued at $2500, I should be able to submit this proof and get the premium for $7500 back because they would have never paid the $10k claim.
@goodmoney4badmoney said:
USPS would have to threaten me with legal action before they saw a penny refunded back.
It’s too bad you feel that way. I believe that both legally and ethically, you’d be obligated to send a refund.
Should there be any kind of penalty for holding the OP's coins hostage for 8 months and for the time and effort the OP expended to get back only a part of the insured value of his coins? I would refund the insurance payment to the USPS after they request it.
They didn't hold them hostage. They bought them from him.
Yeah, but now OP is going to pay to grade them.
True. It would be funny if that took another 8 months.
I think the funny thing would be if the coins got lost again once pcgs ships them out. Deja vu?
Considering the amount of time, abuse and trouble that customers who pay substantial insurance for collectibles go through, that are then lost or in this case incompetently mishandled, there should be compensation for all that. A finance executive I did some work for told me he shipped some large size currency to PCGS currency and they got pilfered on the way to the southern California destination. He has had the usual hurdles and trouble go up from the usps and I don't know if he has gotten anything yet. In his usual professional capacity, his time is worth hundreds of dollars an hour, isn't that worth something as well too? Contacting your Congressional representatives is more or less useless on these issues in my experience. There is usually a portal for filing a case with them as well, with the tracking number, etc.. What happens is you usually get a form communication advising customers to pack their items better; with a sentence or two about how they are working to make the usps better, when all evidence I'm seeing is it is the other way even as they raise rates. Where's the correlation between the performance and cost of the usps and accountability?
Comments
Shipping insurance is not property insurance either. Most of the claims are probably 100% loss, not for partial loss and repairs. There's no reason why the rates would be set by anything other than statistics. Although government entities never cease to surprise me in their ineptitude, I would guess their goal is that knowing the average claim rate and the average claim size, they seek to collect 110-120 claim's worth of premiums for every 100 claims they pay out (although perhaps as a govt entity their goal is just to break even). There is no need to assess actual loss as the customer has paid his premium proportional to the coverage amount. It wouldn't surprise me if the PO spends as much money trying to pay less on claims and fighting claims than if they just paid the total coverage amount. There is no angle to take advantage of, you'd go broke insuring empty boxes for large amounts hoping to cash in on an insurance claim.
Otherwise if we as customers are going to allow retroactive modification of the terms, they really should allow us PCGS customers to request insurance refunds. We ship what we think is $10k of coins to PCGS. They all come back details valued at $2500, I should be able to submit this proof and get the premium for $7500 back because they would have never paid the $10k claim.
I think the funny thing would be if the coins got lost again once pcgs ships them out. Deja vu?
Considering the amount of time, abuse and trouble that customers who pay substantial insurance for collectibles go through, that are then lost or in this case incompetently mishandled, there should be compensation for all that. A finance executive I did some work for told me he shipped some large size currency to PCGS currency and they got pilfered on the way to the southern California destination. He has had the usual hurdles and trouble go up from the usps and I don't know if he has gotten anything yet. In his usual professional capacity, his time is worth hundreds of dollars an hour, isn't that worth something as well too? Contacting your Congressional representatives is more or less useless on these issues in my experience. There is usually a portal for filing a case with them as well, with the tracking number, etc.. What happens is you usually get a form communication advising customers to pack their items better; with a sentence or two about how they are working to make the usps better, when all evidence I'm seeing is it is the other way even as they raise rates. Where's the correlation between the performance and cost of the usps and accountability?