Shipping Defaults to Cheapest Option

It appears that shipping always defaults to the cheapest option during checkout. While I understand that this makes sense it many situations, there are some where it does not. For example, we offer a free local pickup option but only a very small minority of our customers will use this. The rest will need to pay for shipping, but since the cart defaults to the free local pickup option they may end up checking out with that option by mistake. What would be nice is the option to set a default shipping method. Is this possible in the plugin already? I’ve been looking for a way to do this but haven’t found it. If not, is there anyway to do this without modifying core files? Perhaps through a custom script using the api?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-e-commerce/