How exactly would a consumer know which shipping carrier is the safest to use?  A pretty good source of information is the cost to insure a shipment — but not the price the shipper charges, because a shipper’s own insurance pricing is not clearly related to actual risk.  

Instead, let’s compare how much an independent, third party insurer charges to ship packages using the various carriers.  We know that the insurer has an incentive to (a) charge as little as possible, because this is a crowded, competitve market, (b) not charge less than the expected value of a shipment’s loss (expected value being: the sum of: the probability a given dollar-value loss will occur, multiplied by the dollar value).  So the insurance company’s rates are likely a decent indicator of at least comparative shipping safety.

FedEx is our winner, in terms of one-stop shopping. UPS and DHL match it in the International category, but FedEx wins by a HUGE margin (272%, if my math is correct).  CanadaPost and the United States Postal service have embarrassing results.

The caveat here is that there are some confounding variables.  Perhaps the insurance company knows that people who ship via FedEx tend to pack more carefully, or that the types of things shipped by FedEx tend to be sturdier than those shipped by customers of other carriers.  So mabye you don’t need to use FedEx as much as act like the kind of person who uses FedEx.  That’s difficult when you aren’t deciding what it is you want to ship, but.  

Ultimately, I think the effect of confounding variables is low.  I do however recognize that there may be additional factors I’m not considering, which factors could impact the price differences.

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