UPS Stolen Parcel From Their Depot

Manxman_in_exile

Are you going to have to compensate the owners of the original tapes?  Do they understand the risks they are undertaking in entrusting their tapes to you?  What sort of contract do you have with the owners of the tapes?

Sounds to me that what's happened is an intrinsic risk of having a "hobby" that you really ought to be running as a business with appropriate transit and insurance provisions in place.

You say you don't make any money out of this and that you have to pay the carriage costs to return them to Italy.  Don't you charge the tape owners for digitising the contents of their tapes?  Do you do it for them for free, or do you retain the digital content?

If you can't place a value on the tapes for insurance purposes I'd suggest it might be something too risky to continue doing.  Or you accept the risk...

tightauldgit

VHSVideoGuy said:

WhiskersTheWonderCat said:

Aylesbury_Duck said:

I'd have thought that the likelihood of the contents being stolen is tiny.  Who is going to steal 100 VHS recordings of Italian music TV shows from 30 years ago, other than another person with the same (very niche) interest?  If another person with that niche interest exists, I suspect OP would know them.  The likelihood of them working at the very UPS depot handling OP's parcel?  Vanishingly small.

I hope you find them, because I do appreciate the work people like you put in to making these old materials available for the rest of us.

I was just about the comment the same thing. And I can't imagine some avid 1990s Italian Music TV fan being able to smuggle 13KG of VHS tapes out of the depot under their coat unnoticed. 

Did you purchase these tapes? Or did you get them for free? You should always insure them for the amount you paid for them. If you paid more than £50 for them, then that's the risk you take in not insuring them fully. 

This is the crux of the situation... How do you insure them properly? 100 tapes recorded from Italian TV are mostly UK/USA bands playing on Italian TV but and it's a big but.... These are a loan I do not pay for them I pay only the return postage, whatever they are valued at I will have to pay duty then when I box them up to return there will be duty for me to pay again, given that we're talking well over a thousand tapes a year this becomes an even bigger problem, now add to that that no amount of money will return those missing tapes and how many people recorded rock music on Italian TV 30 yrs ago and kept the recordings... Not many and unique tapes are ones people took a video camera into a show and filmed it themselves so there is only one copy, and now that one copy that never left the guys house in Rome since he fiiin 1994 is in a black hole in the UPS warehouse and will eventually be?.. Destroyed? Thrown in a skip? And I get no answer as to what has happened just a customer service runaround.
Its absolutely soul destroying and moving forward I now have to post further tapes knowing that the same thing can happen again and again.
I hope I've explained myself better than the original post and thank you everyone for your replies I fear you're all correct and I'm flogging a dead horse (Dramatically) 

You seem to want your cake and to eat it too a little bit. You want to be able to send and receive the tapes assuming that they are pretty much worthless but then if the courier loses them insist that they are priceless! 

It's just the reality of sending something that 1 in 1000 or 10000 or whatever will get lost. So you either have to take a commercial view of it that the tapes have little value and accept that if they get lost then you won't be compensated very much for them or you take the view that they are highly valueable and either try to send them at that value or find alternative ways to send them. 

If someone is genuinely irreplaceable and of great value to me then I'd think twice about sending it by courier for this very reason. There's a (small) chance it'll disappear.  

If you have to send these is there any reason why they cant be copied and sent or digitised and then sent electronically? It seems like if they are genuinely irreplaceable then copying them before sending them would make sense. 

Manxman_in_exile

What concerns me is not the OP's loss but the loss the owner's of the irreplaceable tapes have suffered.  That's one of the reasons it would make more sense to me if this was run as a business (with proper transport and insurance arrangements) and not as a hobby.

What I don't understand is how this arrangement works and who benefits from it.  Do the owners of the tapes "loaned" to the OP charge the OP for that loan, or does the OP charge the owners for the service of digitising the tapes?  Or is it all free?

VHSVideoGuy said:

WhiskersTheWonderCat said:

Aylesbury_Duck said:

I'd have thought that the likelihood of the contents being stolen is tiny.  Who is going to steal 100 VHS recordings of Italian music TV shows from 30 years ago, other than another person with the same (very niche) interest?  If another person with that niche interest exists, I suspect OP would know them.  The likelihood of them working at the very UPS depot handling OP's parcel?  Vanishingly small.

I hope you find them, because I do appreciate the work people like you put in to making these old materials available for the rest of us.

I was just about the comment the same thing. And I can't imagine some avid 1990s Italian Music TV fan being able to smuggle 13KG of VHS tapes out of the depot under their coat unnoticed. 

Did you purchase these tapes? Or did you get them for free? You should always insure them for the amount you paid for them. If you paid more than £50 for them, then that's the risk you take in not insuring them fully. 

This is the crux of the situation... How do you insure them properly? 100 tapes recorded from Italian TV are mostly UK/USA bands playing on Italian TV but and it's a big but.... These are a loan I do not pay for them I pay only the return postage, whatever they are valued at I will have to pay duty then when I box them up to return there will be duty for me to pay again, given that we're talking well over a thousand tapes a year this becomes an even bigger problem, now add to that that no amount of money will return those missing tapes and how many people recorded rock music on Italian TV 30 yrs ago and kept the recordings... Not many and unique tapes are ones people took a video camera into a show and filmed it themselves so there is only one copy, and now that one copy that never left the guys house in Rome since he fiiin 1994 is in a black hole in the UPS warehouse and will eventually be?.. Destroyed? Thrown in a skip? ...