In Final Holiday Push, UPS Grabs Its Accountants to Deliver Packages | Hacker News Reader

In Final Holiday Push, UPS Grabs Its Accountants to Deliver Packages

wsj.com

185 pointsjseliger107 comments

I worked as a "UPS Delivery Helper" in college during the holiday breaks. I was assigned to a UPS truck and my job was to take the packages from the truck to the door while the driver scanned the next package to be delivered so he never had to leave the truck.

I remember that as we got close to Christmas the packages were packed in the trucks so tight that there was little rhyme or reason to their placement. The entire "aisle" in the back of the truck was filled to the brim. We would literally just choose a random package that was blocking the aisle and go deliver it, often driving back and forth across our area in a very roundabout manner. Once the aisle got cleared and we could actually get to the shelves, the packages could be delivered in a more sane manner.

It always struck me as terribly inefficient but perhaps to UPS the last mile doesn't matter as much because the driver is basically committed to getting his route clear no matter how long it takes.

I wondered about this. A truck was doing the weirdest little pattern around our neighborhood recently. There were two men inside, one older guy doing some kind of tasks inside the van, and another who looked like an off-season track star grinning at people and running these big boxes sometimes a full block to the shipping address.

The man inside was presumably just sorting packages. They train drivers to occasionally rearrange the next bunch of packages in order on the top passenger side shelf for quick access.

And this time of year the trucks are so over packed it takes a while to simply find some packages due to clutter and misloaded packages.

This seems like a combinatorial problem that would very much be worth solving. I can actually come up with some fun mathematics already to deal with it.

I’m sure UPS will be hiring for holiday shifts next year, you can put it to good use!

I'm not sure what you're implying, this would actually be extremely worth while for UPS

He is being sardonic. UPS employs some of the best minds in optimization. The case you mentioned is probably not that complicated for UPS.

Looking at truck size, this doesn't even look like a very hard problem. You can essentially solve it per neighbourhood / post code and then inside each of those sections separately for a good approximation. The interesting question is: why doesn't UPS think that's worth doing? Or are there some fun constraints we're not aware of?

Or specifically: why don't drivers get a preferred route along with their packages?

It sounds like they do, but that it breaks down when the trucks get overfull. I wonder if there's a breaking point where the projection of just how full the trucks will be, which packages will get to be thrown as overfill in which trucks, and how many will fit in each, is outside the operating bounds of their system and they know it's only a handful of days a year so they just brute force it instead of investing a lot (more trucks or more drivers would be the non-algorithmic sort of investment) for a recurring-but-tiny edge case.

Maybe it's like a tech company with a known datacenter footprint and standard load pattern, so normal operations can be done in-house cheaper then in the cloud, but twice a year they have to do 200% traffic and just bite the bullet and scale that out in AWS at a much higher price, but only for those two days, compared to capacity that would sit idle the entire rest of the year.

>Maybe it's like a tech company with a known datacenter footprint and standard load pattern, so normal operations can be done in-house cheaper then in the cloud, but twice a year they have to do 200% traffic and just bite the bullet and scale that out in AWS at a much higher price, but only for those two days, compared to capacity that would sit idle the entire rest of the year.

The reason why that mostly works on AWS is that amazon has someone else to sell some of the peak capacity to the rest of the year. With package delivery, you'd need to figure out something profitable to do with the 'holiday delivery trucks' the rest of the year.

Sounds like the rest of the year they handle the accounting...

When I worked in UPS operations, Peak season (generally starting in August / September when retail stores started stocking up, and building to full force in December) saw volume approximately double.

It's pretty hard to fine-tune a system for maximum efficiency most of the time, then make everything go 2X during a spike with the same level of efficiency. Especially when you're dealing with physical space and people who require training.

This is done, drivers do get a route (EDD trace). Problem is that there's a min wage human (machines are too slow/expensive) with heavy time constraints who loads the truck. If they're part of the 1/3 that is a peak seasonal, don't care, or are pushed too hard by management, the load will be bad. Loading stop for stop is hard and has no incentive.

Most routes (at least here) have business stops which make up the majority of the bulk down the middle. If it's a resi route with a lot of irregulars (70-150lb packages, mattresses, etc) it'll be a mess.

The options to solve this are pretty much more trucks (there are none, and nowhere to put them after the "normal" seasonal increase), more drivers (hiring/training is an issue), making multiple trips (depends on distance from hub), or having parts of the route shuttled out.

Just give the incentive. Give bonuses to loaders when trucks deliver more efficiently. It would probably help with turnover, so the peaks would be much better with second nature efficiency ops at the dock.

I would go so far as to say that if they had invested in efficiency this way they could have developed their ORION project for far less money since they would be crowdsourcing at least the first major part of the solution from their workforce. Study that with sensors and data, and develop your algorithm from there. AFAIK, an experienced taxi driver is every bit as fast as a google maps traffic optimized route.

>Looking at truck size, this doesn't even look like a very hard problem

Can we now add UPS to the growing list of other HN-Commenter-Weekend-Projects? So far I’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Shazam.

I think you took the comment the wrong way. I'm not saying UPS is trivially solvable as a company. I explicitly said there's probably some reason why that solution is not used / not working over Christmas. I'm saying the approximation for an isolated "optimised route for these packages problem" for a truck load of packages is not hard - so what are we missing?

Drivers obviously prefer a fixed route they know, but a complex routing algorithm could shift borders of neighborhoods or even interleave routes to meet timely appointments or size and weight constraints. Consider fairness, too, to equalize load.

Overall it seems the problem is fixed with brute force, taken to the extreme as in the topical article.

I worked at UPS for a season loading their delivery trucks. Each shift was like a really intense game of 3D Tetris, trying to use the space efficiently as more heavy packages of various shapes rapidly arrived from the conveyor belt. So you're not just optimizing the path-finding. You've also got to do optimal bin-packing at the same time.

To squeeze every last dollar out of the available space becomes a quite literal meaning in this context. The ammount of the packages ariving damaged from the sheer load of each on top on another in the containers is really impressive, too.

I’ve diacussed this with a buddy of mine a few years ago. For validation: he is a senior manager at FedEx in Ohio region, dealing with standard delivery (non-rush, overnight, or freight).

The issue with deliveries is more complex as there are several systems with different incentives involves (and managers who bonus is determined by different factors then simply efficient delivery).

1. Deliveries arrive via large container and are organized by postal code but not in any specific order. Why? Because the plane/truck is packed for maximum haul not maximum efficiency of delivery.

2. When packages are sorted for their destination and packaged onto trucks, the incentive is to maximize haul, not maximize delivery efficiency. Why? The worker is incentivized to clear the backlog not to organize for delivery method. There are size constraints. As someone commented further down, it’s like a game of Tetris.

3. The delivery person just has to deal with what’s given and has to complete three rounds (usually).

In a normal situation, my buddy used some “fun math” and an excel sheet to attempt to maximize deliveries. Theoretically, his system would save an average of $0.02 on each package (his calculation, have no clue how he came up with this number or can verify). He was given recognition and bonus as, supposedly, this was a huge feat. However, his system totally broke down during holidays/peak season; There was no way to organize packages in step one accuretly enought that translates to step 2 and 3.

I, as a novice, suggested something like: “why don’t they use robots to sort, scan, and organize packages?” He patiently explained that the cost to retrofit all delivery stations would be enormous. The delivery margin on standard packages are razor thin and would require too much time to recoup and that any advancements went to the “big boys” (freight and overnight) as they generate the most profit).

As such, any suggestion that this is an easy problem that can be solved by some math is obtuse. The system itself would have to be redesigned at a large scale and proven to work prior to testing as any error would cut profits that investors do not like.

They're working on it. They've substantially increased their data collection on the vehicles and their delivery routes in the last decade. Their drivers union stipulates nobody will be fired solely because of sensor data, and that as the efficiency grows, the pay will grow proportionally. A driver delivers many more packages per day now than 10 years ago.

I attended a presentation from Jack Levis at a supply chain conference. At first glance it seems like a traveling sales person problem, but it's much more than that. They have contracts to pickup and deliver at specific times for specific businesses. They have to optimize which packages are on which vehicles, the route, the volume available and numerous other considerations. The combinations get out of hand very fast, you can't do anything near brute forcing. Sometimes the path which will work best looks unintuitive.

They have real time issues that come up (water main shuts a road down for 1 day, in under a minute that info is available to all delivery drivers). They have their own custom developed hardware for the scanning guns which are GPS and network enabled, they have a team of around 700 people working on their ORION project (largely optimization, many PhD's included).

Couple resources on it:

https://blogs.oracle.com/database/big-data-at-ups-interview-...

https://youtu.be/CsJRsToDI8w

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2013/06/ups-astro...

Interesting to see how much they've invested into Orion. I've been working as a seasonal driver, and where I am it's universally ignored, every driver simply uses the "regular delivery order". I think it's plausible many haven't tried it.

I'd like to try using it before I finish.

The Traveling Salesman problem is very well known. What other problem do you have in mind?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

The travelling salesman problem in its classic formulation simply wants the shortest path. But there can be other optimization goals like minimum fuel consumption, which might favor dropping off heavier packages first. Or perhaps minimum total time spent, which entails considering the dynamic traffic conditions like Google Maps or Waze does.

Even in the classic problem, there is of course a crucial step of first using a Floyd–Warshall like algorithm to figure out the distances between your destinations.

Are you talking about the packing problem or the traveling salesmen problem? Both are NP. Though so is k-means and we can still do a good job with stochastic search.

I believe this.

The small business I interned at had similar stories of their UPS deliveries during this holiday time. They'd be expecting some business deliveries, the brown truck would pull up, and the driver had the task of un-building an Incan stone structure out of the back just to get a few packages.

I always thought the route was precomputed for maximum efficiency.

I'm surprised the packages are put in with the route in mind

But by a model made for the other 364 days per year.

Surge models can afford to be inefficient, they are needed rarely and the other 364 days a year your don't want extra overhead.

364 days is going to differ per model though.

(Actually, reading the part of the article which I can, says: "[...] The initial sign ups are voluntary and usually set weeks before the busiest periods." so even here the peak isn't merely 1 day.)

For example, an apothecaries here are very busy in december (insurance-related) so they have spikes throughout entire december. That's when employees are expected to not take free days off.

We also got flex workers who are asked (practically demanded) to show up during peaks. During lows they stay home and don't get paid. The uncertainty attached to such (highly) fluctuating income, together with night shifts (in factories) is a killer. Bad for your stress levels and health.

My partner worked in an apothecary and the stress levels of everyone turned through the roof in december.

So it may seem we should applaud UPS to push their output, but I highly suspect that in reality these white collar workers are just supporting the overburdened blue collar workers. Even if it just mentally supports them because they know they're being helped.

I did this too. Trying not to slip on ice, break packages, or get chased by dogs made for an interesting winter.

Adding my experience. I was a driver helper at one point too, and my driver would deliver all the commercial/business packages first, then park in an empty area (residential side street or parking lot) and we would handsort the remaining packages along his personally directed route. We'd unload each package one by one, the driver chucking them to me from inside the truck with the words "right" or "left" and I'd form two piles depending on the word, then I'd toss them back. First one pile, then the next. He had his route memorized and after reloading delivery was super efficient.

It blew my mind that we wasted an hour or so every day just to optimize something that could be automatic via a machine or at least implemented by the loaders... Sad to see it still hasn't changed.

It's almost as if you all sorted your own binary search tree of UPS packages.

Even better than that: a literal traveling salesman problem!

At least building a binary search tree is O(n.log(n))... what they were solving is NP hard (for the optimal solution).

where do I sign up for something like that?

How’s the pay?

Worked as a trainer to teach new employees how to load trucks in college at a large UPS distribution site. There is an ideal way to load trucks for safety and efficiency i.e. heavy items on the bottom, small light items on top, and hazmat on the bottom sides. This is easy to achieve when the package traffic is light and possible even during moderate package flow. You can think of this process as physical Tetris, which is a great workout. Unfortunately when the package load is very high, loaders just end up hapzardly loading trucks to keep the package flow going and to meet nightly deadlines of filling x number of trucks. This problem was compounded by a high turnover rate, which didn't exist before the addition of health insurance effectively cut hourly salary in half. This process may be more efficient today with better scanners, that hopefully no longer requires loaders to manually key in tracking ids.

I am surprise the trucks dont have randomly loaded internal shelves like Amazon warehouses. Less compact packaging. But always know where everthing is. Plus there are near optimal traveling salesmen algorithms for minimizing driving. Exact optimal path are NP incomplete. But you can get fairly close. I wonder if the white Amazon vans do any of this.

The winter holidays are, generally speaking, an amazing example of how hard it is to scale for massive, sudden, short upticks in the real (not virtual) world. You see it everywhere in the : services losing jobs because they don't have the manpower to service a surge in orders, customers skipping stores because they can't find parking or don't want to wait in line, packages not getting delivered on time, inventory being sold out.

You even see it much closer to home. We're having Christmas dinner at our house this year, a total of 11 people - almost 4x more than normal. We don't have the cutlery, plates, chairs, etc for that many people. Do we buy it? Do we borrow it? Do we rent it? A small thing, but it shows you how even one night can be very demanding.

That's very interesting. It makes me wonder if there are any good free market ways of promoting the over-building of crucial infrastructural services

There's one. Depending on who you ask, it's called surge pricing or price gouging.

I’d imagine there is no way to physically be ready to handle a sudden intense uptick in demand without seriously undermining the everyday allocation efficiency of things like storage space and production equipment. In an industry like shipping that goes doubly so because their main assets are sorting facilities and vehicles. If the plants/fleets are 10x as big as they need to be for 99% of the year it’s probably economically better to just deal with the crunch for that last 1% of the year rather than own too much infrastructure.

Depending on how extreme you want to take the concept of "free market," offer incentives to groups of people to celebrate meaningful cultural holidays on different days. Pay the Greek Orthodox to switch back to the Julian calendar for Christmas (so they'd celebrate on January 7 on the Gregorian calendar), market Kwanzaa like crazy, rebrand the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6) as Santa Claus Day and make a cultural norm of gift-giving then instead of on Christmas, etc.

Honestly, even though I care a lot about attending church services for Christmas, I have never really cared about visiting family and friends on Christmas specifically - it's just logistically complicated and expensive and falls at a stressful time of the year. If you gave me a way to go fly to visit my family on some cheaper day and have it count for the same cultural expectation, I would very enthusiastically take it.

Employees might actually prefer one week of unbounded craziness with a clear end over a whole procession holiday weeks. And with free market doing its thing, in the end you would just see postage ever so slightly cheaper.

"Over-building" here looks like US sprawl in new development areas of the past few decades: huge parking minimums, huge number of road lanes, and all that other stuff that makes this sort of thing not a problem, but is just inefficient waste 99% of the time.

The free market way that the costs (assuming they're significant) would be properly reflected in prices and cause some of the people to shift their purchasing/deliveries/whatever to another time.

Currently, there's no meaningful economic pressure to do your christmas shopping months in advance; so that's probably an indicator that the infrastructure is manageable and no major changes are really needed.

There is a negative incentive as well. Most return policies are thirty days, so if you shop months early you have no recourse should a gift be found to be defective at Christmas.

Probably the most efficient is to ask your guests to bring some extra things?

Depends. Will your guests remember to bring them? (among other concerns)

For cutlery and dishes, one probably wants extras anyway to buffer for those days when they couldn't yet wash the previous day's dishes because they were too busy. We've all experienced it. Probably don't need guests to bring cutlery and dishes. But chairs? Probably no need to have personal buffer for chairs ever. And I'm not sure asking guests to bring their own chairs is the answer when guests come. Does everyone need to go buy folding chairs to be a houseguest now? How do hosts guarantee that the chairs would not damage specific carpets or hardware floors? Etc.

Last year I lent a couple of chairs to my neighbour, since I was going away for Christmas, and he had extra guests.

Whether it is around your dinner table or in the back of a UPS truck, Christmas is essentially a DoS attack.

Merry Christmas, by the way - I just noticed it is after midnight local time, and December 24th!

And you are presumably in continental Europe, where Christmas is celebrated on the 24th! Of course in the USA, it’s celebrated on the 25th.

One of those things that severely confuses people that aren’t aware of it.

That I am - well, on the outskirts of it, in what Pliny the elder referred to as Ultima Thule. (Pliny was an amateur - there's still plenty of land to the north; perhaps that counts as Ultima non plus ultra Thule or something?)

Anyway, adding to the confusion are the Russian orthodox church - they celebrate Christmas January 7th, as they haven't gotten around to adopting the Gregorian calendar just yet.

I didn't know that! Merry Christmas!

We have plenty of dishes, utensils, cups and so on. (Particularly coffee cups - one of the things I collect.) Sometimes it's good to be a hoarder. :)

It's hard to be a hoarder living in a 500sq ft flat.

UPS software developer from Lutherville- Timonium, MD office. My manager, who been with the company for over 20 years went out delivering packages in his car few years ago. Any employee, no matter how high the rank, if needed, should hop into her/his car and deliver packages. We are United Parcel Services.

I love this culture/attitude. With my team, I tell them that if I need to sweep the floors so that we can deliver...I'm grabbing a broom and sweeping the floor.

Every IT employee is a manager, no matter how high you rank is. James E. Casey(founder) recognized that technology will drive the company and technology employee are the one who make company operational 24/7. If for some reason I (or any other manager) ends up at sorting facility and there is no one in charge, I must step in and take the charge of operations.

Sounds like the "Every Marine a rifleman" motto. No matter how high up the ranks you get or what your day job is, you're still expected to be an effective infantryman. There are no 100% desk jobs in the Marines.

Interesting. I used to work in a UPS hub in Colorado as a unload manager. As I was in "management" I was explicitly not in the union. Actually, having been a manager, even though 20 years has passed I can still never rejoin the union at UPS.

One time in my area a yard driver had backed up to the unload bay with one trailer door open. Trucks were usually loaded so full that opening both doors to a trailer would allow the packages to start spilling out. So they'd carefully open a single door to the trailer and back it to the bay and then an unloader would remove a few rows of boxes, giving sufficient clearance to open both doors without spilling. After those few rows were removed, we'd call the yard drivers and they'd come back and and pull the trailer out a few feet, open the other door, and then back the trailer back to the unload bay. We'd then unload the entire trailer.

During one of these movements, a few packages fell out of the trailer onto the ground. The driver simply unhooked the trailer and left it about 15ft off of the unload door with the packages just sitting on the ground. They weren't supposed to pick up packages. That was an unloaders job. I, as the manager, was supposed to get one of my guys out there to move the packages, and then call the yard drivers to come back, re-hook to the trailer and back it in.

Well, this time, I simply went out there and threw the packages back in the trailer myself. All of my guys were deep into unloading other trailers and there is constant pressure to get those trailers emptied and moved, so pulling a guy out of one trailer to come outside and pick up a couple of packages no small disruption.

Not 5 minutes later there was a driver and a union steward yelling at me with a grievance in hand. I was taking work from union employees by picking up these packages and thus had to allow the union employee his grievance worth 2 hours of his pay.

I'm actually shocked that management is out there delivering packages.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I have been with the company for a year now (prior to that I had number of years as dev) and to be honest, I am not too familiar with union side of UPS. But I had multiple conversations with higher managers & leads and they told me how they went out delivering packages. Lead developer who manages team I work in, been with company for 15 years, has driver delivery jacket hanging in his cubicle that he received when he was delivering packages few years ago.

Just recently I got this email: "Directors, A Peak Volunteer Request has come in for Maryland. The request is strictly for Driver Helpers. They are looking for any volunteers that are able to give at least one week.[...]"

It's going to feel like a certain long German word when we replace those people with robots.

Unmentioned in the article is that UPS is largely unionized, unlike FedEx. This makes flexible arrangements like this extra unusual. As an anecdote, my aunt was working as a (corporate) employee at UPS and got in a not-small-amount of trouble when a union rep caught her helping out with carrying packages inside a warehouse.

Unmentioned in the article is that UPS is largely unionized, unlike FedEx. This makes flexible arrangements like this extra unusual.

Maybe allowances for exceptional circumstances are baked into the contract?

More like they are a historically well run company.

Fedex is regulated as a train company so the NLRA does not apply and they can be legally prevented from forming a union. It is very unusual in this day and age.

Strictly speaking, FedEx is regulated as an airline (under the Railway Labor Act). FedEx workers aren’t legally prevented from forming a union but it is harder for them to strike under certain circumstances. I believe DHL is also regulated as a airline and was more unionized when they were still in the domestic delivery business in the US.

I'm currently working as a seasonal driver. UPS rented moving trucks for deliveries as well as portable storage units in residentials to shuttle packages to and have seasonal employees deliver them with golf carts.

A major problem was the golf cart drivers not showing up to work during the cold and rainy days this week. I stop by two of these storage units to grab their scanning devices and several nights this week they were completely filled. Apparently the employee failed to show and no one seems to monitor this closely enough. Lots of missed deliveries resulting from this.

From my perspective it seems like the company has in fact failed to scale at least in my hub. With the center aisle of the truck filled with probably person sized packages you have to climb over things often or simply try to efficiently detour on the fly to get them out of the way.

Hiring enough drivers to keep the center aisle clear on every truck seems like it would massively speed up drivers, I know it would for me. One possibly major hurdle in optimizing seems the range of package sizes. Packages going out can range from letters to the size of a door.

Just getting enough drivers may be a huge issue for them though. During my week long training class, I think half washed out. Several immigrants who couldn't keep up due to poor English or competency with the scanning device. I managed to help one older man from Greece get through the training, and I hope he managed to get through the season.

Also worth noting that the Department of Transportation limits the hours UPS (and presumably others?) delivery drivers can work to 60 hours per week, and this week they were permitted to go to 70 hours, with the 14 hour day limit still in place.

The book is almost ten years old, but Alex Frankel's "Punching In: One Man's Undercover Adventures on the Front Lines of America's Best-Known Companies" had a section on what is was like being a UPS Driver's Helper during the Christmas season.

It was a good read!

This sounds like a fun distraction from one's everyday office job, honestly. I've interviewed at another (much smaller) company that said all the staff are sometimes required to answer phones during high-traffic business times, so it is not unheard of.

I delivered pizza way, way, way back in the day, and every now and then I think that if I didn't have a fuel-hogging unreliable vehicle, I'd go deliver again for a manager I've gotten to know. Not a terrible way to spend an evening every now and then.

I remember at Host Gator the sysadmins would answer phones whenever the chat techs couldn't manage the call volume. It was a nice way to break up the day sometimes from e-mail based tickets and lead to some really interesting stories (like working with a 14 year old child over the phone to help fix some rendering issues on a website that was operated by their blind parent).

This is the norm in more industries than you would expect. A primary example is food service. You have a main job function, but you do whatever is required of you. Dishwasher busted in the middle of the shift? Grab a bus boy and have him help out washing by hand. Late night surge because some concert let out that you didn't know about or plan for and they all decided your food sounded good? Well sometimes the manager rolls up their sleeves and hops behind the line to help cook. Not enough hostesses? Waiters are stepping in to help greet and seat customers.

I work at a seasonal company in the office and it sounds like fun, but that fun wears off quickly. The demand to get packages out the door is intense, being on your feet all day wears you out. Most of these jobs are in a warehouse, so it's colder, dirtier, and just out right hard work.

Perhaps, but often the expectation is extra work with no extra pay, and your other deadlines don't shift.

I sometimes share similar thoughts, and then I realize that my outlook on a manual job like this is one born in privilege. The 8-year-old boy in me would love to try delivering UPS packages for a week, but it would be different knowing I cannot return to my cushy, easy-on-the-spine desk job.

It's not just manpower they're scrambling for this time of year. Around here, they're using Budget and Ryder rent-a-trucks for deliveries to (and pickups from) shipping stores (UPS stores, places that offer mailbox service, etc). Uniformed UPS drivers, rented box trucks.

Talking to the owners of one such place, they said UPS has done that the last few years, freeing up more of their recognizable brown trucks for residential delivery.

I would bet there's more to it than just wanting "recognizable" trucks for residential deliveries. Using a box truck is less efficient because they don't typically have access to the box from the cab, so the driver has to get out and run around to open the door at each stop. But this isn't quite as big of an issue when they're doing commercial pickups/deliveries, because there's usually numerous packages at each stop, so getting out open the back isn't as much of a time sink per-package.

Fedex does the same, and I think many of those are actually used for home delivery.

A few years ago, I saw UPS deliveries in my neighborhood being done via a tiny trailer on a bicycle.

What is amazing is this: It's almost midnight on December 24th. I can still order thousands of items on Amazon Prime Now for delivery in next few hours just in time for Christmas - with free shipping!

It is also clear to me how this is implemented: Available items are all in local Amazon warehouse. The delivery is done by usual Joe the person who has car and can go around one neighborhood. About $8 is recommended tip for the delivery for order < $100. Assuming Joe the person would be going 20 or so deliveries in a small neighborhood, this would take him 5-6 hours. The expected tips alone would make up for minimum wages and fuel expenses.

In all delivery problems, last mile is the most expensive miles and solving it distributedly using local drivers seems like idea even more brilliant than calling cab via phone. You don't need to drag accountants.

I am not sure where you live but it is not usual to tip for regular package delivery in the US.

Tip? Who? Whenever I get a deliver from Amazon. other than USPS, the driver leaves it outside the door and rings the bell. Sometimes I get to the door when they are getting in their car; but, usually, the car is already driving away. (The fact that some of these are annotated in Amazon as being "handed" to me is a separate issue.)

Worth noting that their on-time guarantees for ground packages went away starting on Cyber Monday, and all express packages (overnight, 2-day, etc) have until the end of day rather than the previous time-specific commitments.

ill chime in and say across all shipping options this year it seems that things have gone much smoother than in the past regarding delivery times and other hiccups.

I wish they did here. My daughter's present is in the UPS warehouse down the street right now, but I am told it won't be delivered and can't be picked up until Tuesday because the warehouse is closed on the weekend. The hell!?

>UPS works closely with retailers for months to map out how many orders are expected to flow out from which hubs and into what markets. This year, it started charging extra fees for deliveries during peak shipping days.

Are they actually forecasting demand? Are orders that predictable? If it were, then would they not be able to accommodate the spikes?

Very curious to see how well the forecast demand.

Remember there’s two sides to the equation. Most of the shipments originate from large warehouses or regions that are centrally locates. That’s the aggregate demand part from the retailer. Most retailers can model that.

The delivery side is harder... nobody knows how many pants LL Bean is shipping to my zip code on December 4. You also have the variables of weather, congested highways, etc.

> nobody knows how many pants LL Bean is shipping to my zip code on December 4.

While making predictions of that resolution are not realistic, in general I would imagine that the shipping carriers are in a better position to estimate delivery volume in a certain area than the retailers would be. I would bet that overall volume can be predicted with decent accuracy using historical data.

I'm a supervisor at UPS. Luckily, our center had plenty of drivers.. although I did have to come in on my day-off today.

I was impressed that a package I ordered on Dec 22 from Costco. It was estimated for UPS delivery on Dec 26 but was actually delivered on Dec 23. Considering that I didn't pay to expedite shipping, this was surprising and impressive.

Isn't it kind of weird when a package arrives freakishly early? It's easy to imagine how a package could arrive late. Early? Harder to imagine how that happens.

I ordered a chess set from "Chess & Bridge" in the UK. I'm the United States, in the general vicinity of Seattle, so it had to not only cross the Atlantic to the US, it then had to cross the whole continental US.

I paid for no special shipping, defaulting to some kind of international mail with an estimated 30 days to delivery.

The mail woman brought it to me 4 or 5 days later, completely surprising me.

The other day, My package was delivered by some random guy in a uhaul truck.

I've had packages from Amazon delivered all kinds of ways, including out of someone's personal car. I've seen the mail and UPS do the same too. Fun times.

Yesterday some Fed-Ex delivery people came by, driving a U-Haul van. Followed by a pickup truck which parked in front, and drove off after they did.

Finally, accountants get to see the result of their bean counting. Yes, the job market is tight but it could be eased by paying more.

Non paywall anywhere?

Holiday delivery isn't really "hard" to scale in the sense that it's some challenge nobody knows how to solve. It's just basic economics. If UPS had 2x the number of drivers they'd have no issues during the holidays.

Why don't the have 2x the number of drivers? Because the delivery market is hyper-competitive and stuck in a Nash Equilibrium where if any one delivery company would raise their prices, customers wouldn't favor them.

"Why should I need to pay double to deliver goods with 3 days notice on December 20th? I don't need to do that on any other time of the year!" They'll say.

Instead there's a much simpler explanation. Customers want to pay lower prices for delivery, even to the extent that the reliability of delivery around busy dates will slip. Of course delivery companies will attempt to perform some heroics to make it happen, but their margins will only allow them to go so far, and those are driven by how much customers actually care about prompt delivery.

> Why don't the have 2x the number of drivers? Because the delivery market is hyper-competitive and stuck in a Nash Equilibrium where if any one delivery company would raise their prices, customers wouldn't favor them.

No, it's because they are not necessary for practically the rest of the year.

You’re saying the same thing.

My 20yo cousin works at UPS only during holiday times. They certainly scale during holidays already... just maybe not enough.

UPS can't have 2x number of drivers during the holidays because they only need 1x drivers for the other 11 months. Simple economics would show that 1/2 the workforce isn't going to sit around for 11 months without pay.

Customers don't care who the shipping provider is, and many companies / websites offer free shipping or a sane default, so really, who delivers what is often obscured from the end-user.

> Customers want to pay lower prices for delivery, even to the extent that the reliability of delivery around busy dates will slip.

Typically there's a money-back guarantee for late delivery, but those are either eliminated (for ground) or extended (for express) during the holiday season.

You focus a lot on how well the free market works.

Another aspect here is that reliability is a hidden cost the individual consumer can't see.

My point being this is just as much about hiding the real cost and making things look cheaper than they are.

Most shops will happily guarantee delivery before the weekend. And almost nobody will be held accountable for cries of children neglected by Santa :)

It’s a great example of the failure of markets when reliability and risk are part of the cost equation.

The invisible hand only works when the actors understand what cost is.

I can't believe that. There's always a next Christmas, and you can be sure I wouldn't buy at the same shop that screwed me last year.

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