When you put it like that it seems “insulting”, but the reality is that they aren’t walking out to the field, cutting one single scion, walking back to the packing house and packing it up. The wood is all there and they are just filling orders. It’s their choice to charge an extra 5.00 handling charge, obviously, but I personally think it has more to do with encouraging people to buy more than one then it being a hassle to package one.
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How much is the scion?
Besides they have an obvious shipping error on their website. I expect 10 dollars if they had any sense and sent in free USPS Priority bubble envelopes which they could double up on.
Just looked at my order records for Cummins last year. I ordered 30 pear rootstock and shipping was 29.00. Maybe the estimate you got was a mistake.
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I don’t know what they charge for scion and I have no problem paying 5 for handling they have to pay someone to stand there and fill orders and ship them, I guess shipping has gotten a lot more spendy in the last few years. I mean how much do they weigh? Sheesh. As far as 39th parallel I don’t think he ships to Washington state. I’ll email to confirm shipping cost.
Yeah i have been on here defending companies on shipping costs as i ship things every day and the prices are ludicrous. However scions can go in those envelopes so it should be much less than that.
Im also going with new systems make mistakes and that it was probably auto updated and we should call or email the company to let them fix things. Its hard out there these days and lots of changes for people to adapt to
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Apple and pear scionwood seems to be available everywhere, but there are very few places selling good varieties of stone fruit scions. I’m glad to see Cummins getting in the game. Curious to see how they expand their selection next year, but the $33 shipping does seem very high. Setting up more than 3 or 4 trades a season gets stressful, I’d much rather just purchase it if possible. I just paid a total of $58 for 8 sticks ($5 ea plus $18 shipping and handling) from Bob Purvis, who has been a tremendous source of stone fruit scion wood for years. I can’t imagine him doing it year in and year out for anything less.
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If you’re paying for shipping anyway, maybe you should buy a few scion? I did notice that their scion wood is on the pricey side. 
It could be a variety of things. Possibly, they’re new to shipping scion and are - in an abundance of caution - overpackaging and overspending on the shipping themselves. Goodness knows, it’s gotten quite, quite expensive.
A few people have mentioned that it could be a glitch in the website, which had not yet been set up to calculate a cost for scion wood shipping. That at least is worth an inquiry.
Or, it’s possible that they have chosen to do what a lot of other places have done - keep the price of the item low/competitive, and pad the shipping cost to make up the difference. This has often been the practice on ebay/Etsy.
Though if you think the USPS has been frustrating with botanical items, you should hear the shrieks of outrage from folks who ship chicks/hatching eggs. USPS is the only service that will do so (a holdover from when the average little farmstead acquired their chicks that way). But if they don’t get there on time… eeeeeEEEeeeee. Lots of sellers have stopped shipping until things get straightened out. Hopefully this is not an overly optimistic stance.
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Good way to say it. Thanks
Personally, If I was in the business of selling scions, I would not go to the trouble of sending any packages for anything less than about $25
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They must be still attached to the trees.
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I have never bought scions but I know shipping costs are crazy. When I bought from Grow Organic is was 30 dollars but I got 5 trees so not that bad but would be a very bad deal if I just bought one tree. I just bought peach trees from fast growing trees but I got free shipping. Thing is unless I spent 150 or 149 dollars on fast growing trees shipping starts at 17 dollars. In my experience the most expensive shipping guys are the ones who ship via FEDEX or UPS. The cheapest ones are the ones who ship via USPS but my order is often times late. I find it does not get to the sorting facility at USPS until after the CCAS have been dispatched and at that point it is often delivered and sorted the day after. I work at USPS and am disappointed with their timely services. USPS is cheap but slow.
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Yup in my experience USPS is cheap but slow. I work for USPS so I know how things go and how busy they are but the major issue is things are just processed so slow. My uncle mailed a Christmas card to me before Christmas and I still don’t have it. Meanwhile my grandma got two packages and lives in the same house as me. I constantly get customers coming in and asking me if I got their package yet but one I often times don’t have it because the mail got heavily delayed and two I often don’t have have time to sort the mail for my office until after close because of all the passports I have to do when I am a solo office. I often get there at around 8:45 and open for when my offices gets open at 9:00. My office has no limits on passport appointments other than the time we are open so I often am doing passports from 9:00 to when we close at 1:00 and then sort mail which means packages are not only getting delayed on getting to my office but it is often times a delivery at late in the day. Other offices will not deliver anything that comes in after 8:30 or 9 which delays it a entire day.
I can sympathize. I bought 4 pieces of scion and the total came to 44 €. Shipping here is very expensive and so is scion.
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“Insulting” was a bad word choice. My thought was perfectly reasonable. Cummins can charge what they want and undoubtedly thought about what and where price breaks should be. Likewise, I can look at a $12 stick and, realizing it’s vastly more expensive than any scion I’ve seen anywhere, find the price shocking and choose to shop for scion elsewhere.
When the first stick is $12 and the second costs only $2 more, the effect is to price out the back yard grower. To make a single tree would cost $15. As they charge $20 for a tree that has been grafted, planted, tended, and lifted… I can only conclude Cummins is in the tree business, not the scion business.
I have had great experiences with Cummins… my post was not meant to disparage them. They’ve got a lot of my money and will undoubtedly get more, but not for scion.
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Cummins is my go to source for rootstocks, and i have another 150 coming in this spring. I will be grafting my own, with scions from members here, purchased scions and those that i collected from my own orchard.
I am guessing that Cummins added scions this year as a way of diversifying their company, as im sure they can collect more scions than they will graft in an entire season, as i believe that most of their offerings are summer budded.
They probably have a setting in their program that automatically charges a base price, regardless of what the order is. Like i mentioned above, i have 150 Geneva rootstocks coming this spring, and shipping and handling was only $32.71 total.
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I ordered a couple apple trees from Cummins this year and the shipping seemed pretty cheap… something like $30.
I was pleasantly surprised how much stuff they still had in stock, given all I had heard about places selling out.
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I think what’s getting missed here is the cost of getting the order started. It probably costs them almost as much staff time to pick and package one stick as it does for them to do 20 or 50. To the point that they’d probably lose money on small orders without the handling fee. Some sellers may have a system down where this is less of an issue, or they’re willing to swallow a few losses if it means more traffic. If one of those sellers works better for you, then go there. If you’d like to order from Cummins but can’t justify it, let them know politely instead of complaining on an internet forum. With the right competitive pressure and information, they’ll either figure out how to lower handling prices or decide that the scion business doesn’t work for them. Or they can fix what looks like an error in their system as stated by others. Or maybe they might decide it’s working just fine for them! It’s their business to run as they choose.
Edit: I’d like to note that I’m very guilty of complaining about things on internet forums instead of trying to productively address them. So I certainly don’t mean that as an attack on anyone’s character!
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I think their late activation of their new website seriously affected the orders they received earlier in the year. I know I didn’t order until the new page was up and running, I didn’t want to mess with emails back and forth with quotes, et.al. Also, I’m pretty sure Cummins is using UPS solely for their shipping as UPS comes to the nursery and picks up their packaging daily. What USPS could or would charge becomes irrelevant, they’re not using that service.
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I think another thing is no one is forcing anyone to pay x y or z to order scions, seeds, trees, etc. If its too much, just skip it or look for another source.
The solution is we need Ebay sellers selling scion! 
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Major issue I see with shipping is it is hard to find a website that has affordable shipping for plants. Raintree has affordable shipping but makes up for it in prices and Jungs Seed Company has good shipping rates but they only have small starter plants.
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