Apropos of Nothing

So I ordered some bees' wax based waterproofing for my hiking boots the other day. I was going to get it from the manufacturer's site but they wanted seven bucks for shipping. I dug a bit deeper on the web and on Ace Hardware's site, of all places, I found the stuff. The shipping was even more at over twelve dollars, but the goods themselves were half the price as the manufacturer's. What kind of discount do retailers get, anyway? Wow.

Sadly they ended up shipping the stuff with DHL. The last delivery I had from those guys was supposed to be overnight. The box was in town overnight, but the driver didn't know where to find the house and didn't bother to ask. The box went down to the southeastern corner of the state. I had to call them after seeing on the web that it wasn't being delivered. They completely botched my directions; they were written on the side of the box two days later when it was finally delivered.

The box from Ace shipped yesterday. Tonight I got an e-mail from DHL saying they were going to deliver my package, um, today. The shipment originated in Brooklyn, New York. Yesterday I saw that from there it went straight to Ohio. After tonight's message, you know, the night of the day in which DHL said the package would be delivered, their site shows the package now to be in Pennsylvania.

Um, isn't it going further away? No wonder it costs twelve bucks.