I’m not laying the blame ‘fully’ at the feet of 1F. Shipping off continent presents new sets of problems. When relocating here I looked to ship myself heirloom furniture and the like. It was very difficult to find ‘any’ shipping company to talk to me in terms of ‘freight’ shipping. They all seemed to want to ship gramma’s rocking chair overnight air. The few I did find that shipped slower, charged roughly the same…so there’s that.
I’m convinced that they (shipping companies) find shipping ‘everything’ via the same method saves money and causes less confusion for them. The down side for the consumer, is lack of choice.
Seems a good opportunity for a competing shipping company to fill that niche and to ‘only’ offer cheap (but slower) options. They won’t of course, because marketing has been trained to compete by duplicating successful existing companies, and never try anything new. (So we get rows of car dealerships, and hardware stores across the street from each other… )