So you’re heading back to the dorms and once again have to haul a bunch of stuff with you, except your car is a Kia Rio and you can fit four boxes of books and then you’re out of room. Such is the conundrum of moving back and forth from home to school each year.
If your parents don’t happen to have a truck or SUV to help you move all of your supplies back to school then you might be stuck making multiple trips. However, you might want to look into a service that Greyhound offers called PackageXpress in which you can ship large items for very cheap. Greyhound touts their service as being "your one-stop source for shipping oversized, heavy weight, same day and overnight freight at incredibly low rates."
Doing a quite quote from the Greyhound website shows that the cost of shipping a 40lb box from Washington D.C. to New York is $41 (see screenshot below from the Greyhound PackageXpress website). However, if you show a student ID then Greyhound will knock off 25% of the cost. Furthermore, if you have a Student Advantage card Greyhound will take off yet another 25%, bringing the total savings to 50%. So that $41 shipping rate becomes $20.50 to ship a 40lb box, which is much cheaper than anything FedEx or UPS will offer. Visit the Greyhound student discount page for details of this offer.
The one caveat with this Greyhound shipping is that it is not door to door. What you do is drop off your goods at the nearest Greyhound bus station, it then gets put on the next available bus (if you ship priority it is ensured to go on the soonest bus possible to your shipping destination). The goods are then dropped off at the bus station in your destination city, so you have to pick up everything there. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is much cheaper than paying for movers or other delivery companies and could work for some of you out there.
