This is more due to safety and security requirements of the package than the economics or shipping itself. FedEx and UPS will be very happy to ship you something for a steep discount without any assumed liability, but there would be no takers for it. Providing a trusted chain of custody for the package all the way from point A to B is the real value add.
Well, “pay a dude to carry it onto and off a plane” is also a chain of custody arrangement of sorts, you just wouldn’t normally expect it to be cheaper than a company specializing in such.
It wouldn’t be if you regularly did it. But in emergency “work has halted” type of scenarios, you have plenty of labor standing around doing nothing already. And, they’ll take the task way more seriously than any courier would.
This was over the Christmas-New Year period. There was a real risk of a shipment getting stuck in customs for days or possibly even weeks. An arriving passenger's luggage doesn't go through that same process. I mean it's obviously still checked by customs but it's done so immediately.
I don't know about that... shipping heavy and/or large stuff becomes very expensive even without insurance (= no assumed liability). Big shippers get big discounts from UPS and FedEx so as the little guy you get screwed by price discrimination. Airlines are a much more competitive market.
I think you can still get chain of custody, though. I have a laptop for anything touching prod and while the chain of custody needs to be kept for physical security, the value of insurance for my company is negligible. It's probably cheaper and easier for them to just eat the cost if something happens during transit than to try and deal with an insurance claim.
Another case is for shipping products to customers. With how insurance works, the insurance would cost you more than just sending the item again. However, proof of delivery is really nice for if a customer claims something was never delivered.
