The Kitchen

So I got an e-mail a little while ago from a law firm which had filed a class-action lawsuit against UPS for their over-size dimensional adjustments. Basically, they allege UPS has been overcharging their customers by mismeasuring packaging and then adjusting our shipping charges accordingly. UPS denies this, but they came to a settlement (lawyers probably did nicely on that). We do a lot of shipping via UPS, so this is relevant for us.

The question is, when filling out the claim form, how much did UPS overcharge? Fortunately, I've saved every PDF invoice UPS has prepared for us since January of 2008. These invoices each contain a line saying how much of a dimensional adjustment was applied. Unfortunately, there are over 300 such invoices to go through!

So I whipped up a little program to figure it out. It turns each PDF into plain-text using the PDFBox library. Then, since they're all very standard, it looks for a particular string of text next to the adjustment amount and turns that into a number, which it then adds up.

Although the law firm just asked for the total adjustment amount, we felt that some of UPS's adjustments were probably legit, so we reduced the amount charged by 1/3. Not sure if we'll actually see any or all of this settlement, but it would be cool if we did.

If anyone does a lot of UPS shipping and would like to use my program, you can download the ZIP file containing it and all the libraries here.