As you can tell, I love talking about health law issues, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
FedEx charged me $250 last month, in a scheme to defraud passport applicants (in my opinion) into thinking that FedEx can deliver applications to the US Passport Office (they can’t). So, I decided to do the only thing I know how to do, put pen to paper and tell you about it and see if I am wrong.
Highway Robbery. In the pioneer days of this country, farmers in the mid-west harvested their crops and then built rafts to float their produce down the Mississippi River to market in New Orleans. Then, they walked back, up the Natchez Trace, sometimes all the way to Illinois.
The term “Highway” originated with the Romans, who would pile dirt from ditches to make roads high enough to remain dry and easily passible. The term eventually came to mean any pathway that was the best way to get from one place to another. Which is what the Natchez Trace was, in my home state of Mississippi.
It didn’t take long for thieves along the Natchez Trace, called “highwaymen,” to figure out that people with money would be walking right past them on a predictable path. All these thieves had to do was hide and wait. And this is where we get the term, “highway robbery.”
FedEx Passport “Smart Service.” Highway robbery also refers to any excess profit earned at the expense of unwitting customers. Here is what happened when it came time to renew my passport. I asked my office manager to help me. She said FedEx can do it for about $250 plus the official fee charged by the US State Department.
I asked, “why do we need to pay FedEx $250?” And she responded, “they give you shipping labels to send your old passport and the application to the Passport Office.” So we paid the fee and we got our shipping labels, but used the wrong form.
When I got to the FedEx office, the lady at the counter informed me we had the wrong form, and would need to go back to the “smart service” website and do it all over again. I told her, “I also have the correct application I got from the US Passport website (just to be safe, I always try to anticipate problems). “So, you can just ship it from here?”
She replied, “No, the U.S. passport office address is a P.O. Box and FedEx can’t ship to a P.O. Box.” “Okay,” I asked (in a tone I am not proud of), “why am I paying FedEx $250 to ship someplace you cannot deliver?”
So I then looked closely at the address of the U.S. Passport Office on my application and the address on the FedEx Labels. And I looked back at the lady. The Passport Office is in Irving, Texas—15 miles from my front door. The FedEx shipping labels were for some company in Florida that FedEx calls a “partner.”
Near as I can tell, the $250 FedEx “smart service” pays to ship my old passport 1,312.4 miles in the wrong direction to a company in Florida, who would then (I presume to cover up the fact that FedEx can’t deliver passport applications), goes to the post office in Florida to mail my passport application 1,312.4 back to a Texas address, which is 15 miles from me.
I took my application to the post office in Dallas, where it cost me $9 to send a Priority Mail envelope to Irving. Which I share with you now, as a public service warning. That “Smart Service” seems to be anything but “smart.”
I worry about this country. Sure, we don’t have to float our produce down the Mississippi on rafts, but there certainly seem be highwaymen waiting on the path wherever we need to go, who have so little fear from consumer protection laws, that they don’t even need to “hide.”
Martin Merritt, J.D., Ole Miss Law ’86. Martin tried over 500 healthcare law cases to jury verdict, judgment or ALJ administrative law decision. He has been selected to the 2024 D Magazine “Best Lawyers in Dallas” List, Texas Monthly’s “Texas Super Lawyers” and U.S. News and World Reports “Best Lawyers in America,” is Past President of the Texas Health Lawyers Association, Past Chair of the Dallas Bar Health Law Section and State Bar of Texas award-winning author, has published books from the ABA, and published hundreds of articles on matters related to health law and legal ethics in the Federal Lawyer, the Texas Bar Journal and many trade publications. If you have a question or need to make a referral, Martin can be contacted at his office in Dallas, Texas. Email at Martin@MartinMerritt.com