FedEx and UPS hit companies with unexpected holiday shipping limits | Hacker News Reader

FedEx and UPS hit companies with unexpected holiday shipping limits

modernretail.co

209 pointsmooreds201 comments

There is a huge difference between "FedEx and UPS are limiting the number of items we are allowed to ship", and "Fedex and UPS are limiting the number of items that they will pick up and scan for us but we can still drop everything off at a depot ourselves with no limit".

The article is using the terms "shipping limits" and "pickup limits" interchangeably, which is very misleading.

If everybody starts bringing tons of stuff into the depots, there may very well be a limit on that too, soon. Or maybe there'll just be the natural limit that you'll wait in line all day and not get to drop off before closing.

You'll have a madhouse at those depots if every shipper starts individually hauling in all of their (unusually high number of) packages.

For a retailer of any scale these might as well be the same thing.

Dropping off at a depot is not really how this bit of the industry works – the courier collects from the distribution centre in almost every case.

The issues with doing your own drop offs include: finding a new courier, booking, figuring out a collection time which then impacts your shipping estimate cut-off time, and paying for this whole service.

In terms of price, you're going from a high volume commodity service at typically a crazy low price for courier shipping (for what it is), to adding a new additional short-term, lower volume or unproven volume, from one of the smaller providers who aren't operating at Fedex/UPS scale. I could imagine this doubling shipping costs, which might be untenable for many ecommerce businesses.

In terms of the actual logistics, it's a challenge, plus typically this would be automated – your software will do this all for you. Now your software needs to book and pre-advise a new provider? And track through them? But also track through the original one?

For most businesses it's probably impractical to implement this, and for most that could they probably have contracts with the couriers that mean they won't be hit by this or they do their own deliveries. I think the space in the middle is a pretty small subset of companies.

> Dropping off at a depot is not really how this bit of the industry works – the courier collects from the distribution centre in almost every case.

I am aware of this. The posted article is referencing merchants with 3000 shipments to send out, which is not insane scale. If FedEx wouldn't pick those up at your door, it is possible to get those shipped out still. Obviously, yes, you may need some new logistics coordination, and it will be more expensive, and yes, it could make a lot of business margin's no longer work. I am definitely not saying that I agree with any action that FedEx/UPS is alleged to be taking here (especially without reasonable notice).

But that is not the same thing as "FedEx is refusing to let us ship more than X boxes per day". And it's a distinction that the article should get right.

I would like to propose someone create a new emoji symbol for "I'm mad at the journalist".

It would save so much time.

There has been a big shift to ship-from-store to make up for limited warehouse capacity to meet increased demand. The options for delays for store picks up are much the same: employees drop off at depot, third party courier, or wait.

We are a high-volume shipper. Our limits were per-account, not per-location nor would drop-offs be accepted and treated in any way differently.

I suppose that we could ship as much as we wanted paying over-the-counter full-retail rates, just like anyone else could.

In contrast to the retailers stories in the article, these limits were not a surprise to us. We’ve been planning for months to accommodate this and I think our main carrier (UPS) did a great job of communicating, even as things were somewhat being defined.

That changes things. I know that DHL express is doing this all the time during Q4. Until now I thought it to be a pickup issue. Now that is more like a general capacity issue. Do these limits impact your overall shipping capacity or do you manage regardless?

That's treading towards company confidential data, so I'll just say that it did represent a serious threat to overall capacity but that we have been able to navigate well enough by using a variety of tactics (including demand shaping, negotiating with carriers, and tweaking some of our fitness functions for fulfillment scheduling [to ensure we never/rarely wasted our carrier parcel allocation, even if it might be slightly cheaper to fulfill an order a different way if we had infinite outbound parcel capacity]).

Thanks for answering anyway! And already kudos for a nice job. I just hope I didn't jinx your Q4 now... Part of me wished to have an ops role in 2020, another part is happy I don't. Not sure which one is stronger, so!

I'm the source. And yes, we are also being turned away at the depot. "Shipping limits" and "pickup limits" are used interchangeably because they're one and the same limitation currently. I even offered to drive our packages in a UHAUL to Las Vegas or Denver hubs to insert them myself and was told a hold would be placed on our account.

I hate to be the one to ask, but ... why can’t they throttle demand and increase capacity by raising prices?

They did as everyone can just pay over the counter rates without issue, because you can ship anonymously.

Nobody is shipping 500 packages/day over the counter.

I would love to try this one day as long as the Benny Hill song can play in the background as I make trips from my van into a retail UPS store.

I have a friend who works in a UPS Store. He has been working 10+-hour days for the last two weeks, on top of a bicycle commute (which will sometimes turn into an hour-long walk if the winds are bad), picking up groceries, etc.. They have as many employees as they are allowed to have (given the store size), and right now the work is never-ending.

> I would love to try this one day as long as the Benny Hill song can play in the background as I make trips from my van into a retail UPS store.

Please don't do this, or even joke about it.

Seriously. The UPS store I go to always has a line, usually extending out the door due to 6' distancing, and it probably would not literally hold 500 average-sized packages. I know it certainly would not hold 500 additional, average-sized packages.

The UPS store I go to sometimes has one other customer.

Can I ship you a package to ship from your UPS store?

Sure bro, fedex it to me.

This was my thought. I was just at a UPS store and there was nobody else there. I assume some are just busier than others.

I helped a friend pack and ship a successful Kickstarter campaign. The first time we showed up at the UPS store with a minivan full of boxes they made us set up an account. They had no interest in an "anonymous" transaction for more than a couple packages.

Don't be a slacker. You have to bring in one at a time. If they kick you out you gotta move on to the next UPS store.

FedEx would only pick up 110 Letterfolk packages per day ... Galbraith had a queue of 3,000 orders waiting to go out.

There are 26 UPS stores in San Francisco for example. 10 packages at each location per person is hardly going to raise red flags. Use multiple people and add in FedEx and you could probably cover their 3k package backlog in one day. It's not going to cheap or scalable, but you can bet some people are going that route.

I commented similarly elsewhere, but in my experience UPS won't ship more than one or two packages without an account. Red flags will definitely be raised if you try to smurf package shipments.

Interesting, that's not been my experience.

So ... this “limit” is really just a “limit on how much you can send with a discount”? Well, there goes the newsworthiness...

Edit: Can someone please explain my error here? This comment [1] (as well as the immediately surrounding thread) indicates the limit applies to a business account that pays lower rates, and you have the unlimited right to ship on a non-business account that pays higher rates. Thus, the limit is really just a limit on the discounted rate. Which is equivalent to a price increase. Which is totally unsurprising and dog-bites-man for a case of high demand and difficulty increasing capacity. Thus, no longer newsworthy.

So where's my error, really?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348485

To start with, the business account is not only about paying a better rate. It's relevant for your internal accounting, taxes, etc...

You can't just start handing out business credit cards to everyone you send to the store, the alternative is to ask employees to pay out of pocket and pinky swear to reimburse them.

Then there's the question of liability. If your business account shipped something, any questions of liability are clear cut and easy to deal with. If a random employee shipped something, who's liable for any issues?

And how about efficiency? Not only are you paying a reduced rate with a business account, but the provider comes and picks up your packages from you on a regular basis. If instead of putting things in the right place and answering the door when the UPS driver comes by, now you're paying however many employees to pick up a bunch of packages, drive over to the closest location, and wait in line. I don't know what the lines are like at UPS right now, but I do know that the USPS lines around me are about 45-60 minutes depending on the time of day. Not to mention that line starts outside in the cold.

And that's all assuming your employee brings 20 packages to the clerk and has no problems shipping them all in the same transaction.

Which means it's possible that your employee(s) didn't do their normal job, got frustrated and cold and risked infection standing in line instead, you paid a premium to do so, and some of your packages didn't get shipped regardless.

> the alternative is to ask employees to pay out of pocket and pinky swear to reimburse them.

Uhh, fwiw, if you tell an employee you'll reimburse them for something they do for your business, it's got a little bit more heft in a court than a "pinky swear."

Thanks, I hadn't considered that. What about if you cross your fingers?

My post was to point out the absurdity of the claim that a business account with UPS/FedEx is nothing more than a discount. The part you quoted is a joke, and is not to be taken as legal advice. I am not a lawyer, and also IANAL.

You're not giving legal advice, you're just... casting aspersions on the process of a business asking for you to file an expense report, for some reason, when it's a perfectly normal thing at many businesses (and one that I have performed hundreds of times myself, because ugh consulting.)

Like, you could complain that the reimbursement process is a tedious paperwork-generator, maybe, if you think your other objections aren't enough already?

I really don't understand your position at all, but it seems like you're more upset than I would expect given the context.

In good faith I will refrain from joking about expense reports in the future.

I did not intend to cause offense, I just saw room for a joke I thought would lighten the mood of the post a bit by making it seem more childish. I'm not trying to demean people who file expense reports or something.

I was just taken aback by what seemed to be a vague and completely unnecessary “employers can never be trusted and employees are suckers” sentiment in the middle of coherent words. If it was a joke it undermined the serious points.

If you have low-wage workers, it simply isn't practical to ask them to float you hundreds of dollars in shipping costs. It's great that as a consultant you can do that. It might be useful to realize that most Americans are in a very different financial position.

Yeah do that and they detect it (you better believe UPS and FedEX have EXCELLENT analytics) and they put a hold on your account and if you rely on shipping you are screwed.

You don't play stupid games with a critical part of your business operations.

If anything it just stresses the need for businesses to have more contingency plans and supplier/partner depth. Yup, it's not as cheap as winging it with a sole provider for the best deal you can get but you also won't be in a situation where you are screwed at a critical point in your business calendar.

Business operations - so much fun!

I believe they had been, and perhaps still are, charging per-shipment fees to "high-volume" shippers. And that is good in that it is leveling the charge on the culprit (the ones benefiting from e-commerce the most). Retail shippers already pay more and that wouldn't hit the source of the problem. And most shippers have contracts that may prevent sudden price increases based on volume (typically volume is rewarded).

Throttling a spike using price forces everyone to pay the marginal rate, and to use price as a "good" throttle requires the logistics companies to have perfect knowledge of the demand/price curve.

Given that shipping can be a significant price component for multiple types of e-commerce, transparency on when they can issue their final "get it by Christmas" sales with their standard/deterministic pricing structure.

> Throttling a spike using price forces everyone to pay the marginal rate, and to use price as a "good" throttle requires the logistics companies to have perfect knowledge of the demand/price curve.

Not really, you just keep raising prices per day until it gets to the rate you want. If you want more packages lower the price.

I have no idea why you think something that has been done since the foundation of capitalism is somehow completely foreign or impossible to compute or experiment with. Unlike in an economics class companies will never solve the two equations to perfectly maximize the profit, it's more of a range and they're hoping to get close enough. That's a much more realistic approach that has historically worked.

High-volume shippers have contracts with carriers, often more than one year in length. Some of them are referenced to the retail rate. Many though are defined price (including surcharges) with annual escalations. Parcel carriers have been disrupted to some extent by Amazon building out their own logistics capability both line-haul and last-mile and have been signing contracts with non-Amazon shippers to ensure they could cover their costs and make a profit.

Now, pandemic hits and drives a lot of unexpected, probably just this year, traffic into parcel shipping that would have otherwise been freight to stores and passenger car to homes and there's not enough capacity.

There's not as much price shaping they can do without being in violation of their contract. In a lot of cases, they know they need these big shippers next year as well, so they can't entirely burn them this year even if they were willing to litigate the contract.

It's an interesting contract, that locks in a price for a service but not whether the service will even be available.

This works if you don't care about churn, or necessarily moving a certain number of units/preserving capacity on a given day. As there are only 17 days until the theoretical peak delivery date there isn't much room to adjust. A miss-price on December 20th may cause you to sell out remaining capacity or worse favor one customer over others.

A second price auction market for available capacity could allow the market to adapt fast and transparently to available capacity.

The real answer is it’s politically incorrect to do that. Refusing service is cheaper than raising prices. Raising prices introduces all kinds of media and government scrutiny with unquantifiable downside. It’s the right thing to do but not the political thing to do.

One reason may be that they are already at capacity for shipping and they simply cannot pick up any more packages.

I mean, there are two choices here: Limit the incoming packages giving the shipper transparency in the delays and letting them control which packages get more delay

Taking all the packages in and then randomly letting some of them sit in a warehouse until they can be processed, giving the shipper no insight into when a package may ship.

I think the first is a better option for the seller since they can pass that insight on to their customers. It sucks all around, but it's better than sending a box into the void.

FIFO?

They probably would do FIFO with overflow. The problem is that there’s no communication with the retailer about how long the delay would be.

That wouldn't make any sense for FedEx/UPS though. If you get three packages in Atlanta, and the first and third are going to Los Angeles, and the second one is going to Birmingham, it makes a lot more sense to process package 1 and 3 together and probably take care of number 2 first.

That happens on the first sort.

You can't know what's going where to know to scan it in/ route it until after the first touch

UPS and FedEx don't really have warehouse space for things to sit. The facilities are all designed to unload, sort, and load parcels as efficiently as possible.

Oftentimes the lines run in alternating inbound / outbound directions. The same conveyor belt that carries packages from an inbound regional trailer to a local delivery vehicle at 4am, might run in reverse at 8pm to carry local business pickups to the outbound regional trailer at 8pm.

If the packages from one flow can't clear the lines, the system could grind to a halt.

I worked at UPS during an unprecedented winter storm in the Pacific Northwest during the holiday season, and the only way to store packages in the system was inside the limited number of spare trailers that could be parked at the facility.

That's not totally true. They do support scheduled shipments for folks like Apple where the items are shipped but held to insure basically a global US delivery date for most packages in the batch. But this is pre-planned, normally at worldport etc.

They do support scheduled shipments for a few customers who pay significant premium for that. What they cannot reasonably do is to do internal buffer for their own internal shipping capacity because the whole system simply is not designed for that. There is some somewhat significant and usually unnecessarily large capacity (because it is optimized for through-put, not storage efficieny) for warehousing of in-transit packages, but the current demand is so large that warehousing capacity is the limiting factor.

The key issue is that currently, any warehoused shipments will INCREASE ultimate required throughput rather than decrease it, because most holiday shipments need to arrive before 12/25, and the curve of shipments is increasing not decreasing.

So if you had some buffer, you'd be buffering into more constrained capacity rather than less. Buffering works better if you buffer into a quieter period. That's not this sitution. So yeah, backpressure needs to flow to shippers in terms of pricing etc.

UPS does indeed run a third-party-logistics (3PL) business, but I doubt that's able to be cannibalized to act as a buffer tank for their parcel business. (I also suspect that UPS's 3PL business is also booming this year. They reported Supply Chain & Freight as their fastest growing segment in Q3 earnings, growing 16.5% year-on-year, while US domestic grew "only" 13.8% with the note "continued elevated residential demand". SC&F is not solely domestic 3PL, so it's hard to be sure how that sub-segment is doing, but it's probably also under volume pressure.)

Not universally true, unless it's changed recently due to Amazon weening away? My old neighborhood was effectively force taken over by UPS. All the houses were razed, and much of it is warehousing for storing items for third party suppliers.

This happened with Canada Post last holiday. Over 1000 container overflow in one sorting center in a major Quebec city alone. They really didn't catch up for 6-8 weeks after the holidays.

This was PRE COVID as well.

I’m so confused. Why are so many people in this thread trying to say this isn’t real, or it couldn’t possibly be that bad, or it’s no big deal companies should just deal with it, or just bring the boxes to the counter, or just rent your own truck and deliver the packages yourself, or whatever other excuse?

Seems like this is just another nail in the coffin of small businesses and another few hundred billion in Amazon’s market cap.

This. Logistics at scale is like spinning plates. One falls so does the rest, and when you're dealing with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of packages (which is still a fraction of Amazon's scale) you're not filling up a family van and taking it to retail.

Amazon has the advantage of their own logistics infra, and scale. They earned it.

But to those suggesting "why can't you...?" -- well, you try it.

This is the equivalent of AWS or Azure going down indefinitely for these businesses.

Because most people aren’t large shippers. People go on experience not logic. Welcome to the internet.

Shipping is the only reason I still use Amazon. Their search is awful, their listings are manipulated, their reviews are fake, their prices change randomly and are often high. But their shipping is the best in the industry.

That and not having to create an account.

My experience with Amazon Logistics has not been very good. They are driving the quality of delivery across all carriers down by hiring out to bottom of the barrel delivery agents who must cut every corner possible in order to finish their deliveries on time.

Before AMZL, packages were delivered to the door of my apartment building. After AMZL started dropping packages in the lobby, in the parking garage, and outside the front door of the building, it was only a matter of time before UPS and FedEx started to follow suit. Now all packages end up dumped in piles in unsecure areas of the building. Around this time of year, I'm digging through 15-20 packages to find things addressed to me.

The building installed some package lockers, but the Amazon people usually avoid them because it takes time to put stuff in.

I am about to stop shopping on Amazon so that I can stop supporting what they've done to shipping over the last few years. It's unfortunate that one bad actor can degrade the overall quality of its competitors.

I had the opposite experience. Before Amazon delivery, UPS and FedEx dropped packages in my mailroom (which is, by bad design, publicly visible). Then Amazon started delivering to my door, and UPS and FedEx later started doing so too although not as reliably.

Fedex and UPS have suspended their on-time guarantee since March (my company focuses on auditing Fedex and UPS; most disputable mistakes are late deliveries)

I have had so many late packages lately. Fedex Ground was supposed to deliver Friday ... then it slipped to Monday, then today. This morning the tracking was updated to say it'll arrive tomorrow. So frustrating.

USPS has been really bad here in the Detroit area, too.

Of course Amazon packages are rarely or ever late.

My recent amazon orders have taken weeks to even ship.

Where do you live? I am in the Bay Area, and for me personally Amazon has been the only place which has had consistent delivery times in recent months.

This isn't the case for me in the mid-Atlantic region. Prime used to mean "free 2 day shipping", but it hasn't necessarily been that way even before the pandemic. Yeah, it's free, but it'll get there when it gets there, often after the estimated delivery day. Often the day after they say it was delivered.

Same story here with UPS. Ordered a computer recently. Original delivery estimate was last Thursday. Then they updated and said it'd arrive yesterday. Why does a one-time delay incur four days of lateness? In four days I could've driven to the origin and picked it up myself. To make matters worse it didn't even arrive yesterday. Apparently it's at a facility less than three miles away yet they couldn't get it to me in the 13 hours it stayed on the truck before going back to the facility. Finally arrived today - after four delivery delays and five days past the original maximum estimate. The worst part is I paid the merchant to ship it expedited and received nothing like expedited service but since I'm not the one who made the contract with UPS I can't get a refund.

Just as a not, I've had FedEx deliveries come through after 9PM in the last month. The on-time guarantee is suspended but I'm still impressed with how hard they've been trying (at least in my area).

I know the drivers are working hard, and have been a big part of keeping the US functional during the pandemic.

Speaking with the FedEx folks in my area, they’ve been working 7 on, 1 off. At UPS we’ve been doing 6 on, 1 off as we don’t work Sundays per the union contract.

I've found this frustrating, but understandable? I don't know.

I shipped a laptop to a new employee, paid $250 for shipping. It got there three days after it was supposed to. It sucks to pay so much for weak service, and like no visibility into what's happening. I'm honestly surprised at this point none of the carriers haven't introduced some sort of estimate based on ML rather than their delivery standards. It seems like they should have enough data points by now.

A year ago you could get the full $250 back (barring some issues like weather, or shipping during the holiday blackout period from Cyber Monday to Christmas).

Right now the estimates they give you have always been tied to the guarantee. I'm not sure if they'll ever start showing guarantees based on actual delivery; one thing is the carriers tend to operate in lockstep. There are a handful of companies in our space that are trying to provide additional insight, but as alluded to, they have more data points than any of us do.

After I was laid off, I shipped my company-issued equipment back over a month ago. They still haven’t gotten any of it. They know it shipped because they have the tracking number.

If Fedex and UPS have suspended their on-time guarantee how is your company providing value to customers?

Can you point me to any good resources where I can stay up-to-date on the shipping industry?

In terms of auditing, we do evaluate other services the carriers offer (like address corrections, residential surcharges, etc), as well as help our customers catch things like unmanifested shipments (ie, you print off a label, customer cancels order, and you don't cancel out that shipment). We have a full suite of reports and analytics that extend beyond just our service. We also provide contract analysis and optimization.

In terms of resources, of course I have to point to our blog and podcast, available from RefundRetriever.com.

There is a typo on y'all's front page:

> FedEx and UPS both have very complicated contracts. We break down all your current costs, zones, weights and highlight WERE we see savings potentials with our own proprietary software.

Well that's embarrassing! Thanks for pointing this out.

From what I am reading, the limit is only on the number of packages that FedEx and UPS will pick up directly from the shipping depot.

This is typically a free service they provide (though paid for smaller volume). It would seem to me that renting a truck and delivering packages to the local center would be the easiest workaround.

The article mentions a company shipping through UPS when they capped FedEx and having to pay the retail rates on their UPS account. I cannot imagine that paying the UPS retail shipping rate is cheaper than renting a truck for a month to ride out the limitations.

One fun thing is that the FedEx lot near me is already full of rental trucks, Penske, Uhaul, etc. as they use them to expand their delivery fleet.

Very true, same with my local center. I would imagine that could increase the cost of renting your own Penske/Uhaul box truck.

I imagine there is an increase over last year, but every year there are expansive rentals of trucks. In our area we find that sometimes multiple trucks meet at the grocery store parking lot and further pass out packages.

I wonder if the issue is more the volume over the year never let up and rolled into a marginally increased holiday shipping or if it's really a multiple factor of shipped packages over last year.

Either way, Penske , Uhaul, etc. who've probably had less rentals this year vs previous, must be happy to see their stuff being delivered.

Even amazon has people delivering from their own cars around here.

I doubt it, those companies probably love this arrangement as almost no one moves in the winter.

Look at the directionality of prices for one way rentals. Because of the outflow from big cities NY area pickup -> Southern US dropoff prices are still 3x+ vs going the other direction, where I believe they used to be similar prices both ways.

We were explicitly told they would deny our packages at the depot/hub and would be limited to 5-10 packages at each FedEx Store in the area. All packages in the area still flow through the hub and an end of day report for packages scanned is used to enforce this.

Re: our UPS rate, we aren't paying retail rates, thankfully. But the final weeks of Q4 is not an ideal to negotiate favorable rates when they know we have no other options.

Thank you for the clarification (I'm assuming you're the company mentioned in the article). That is crazy and I applaud you for going to the media about this.

You could always just use USPS.

We sell discounted postage with print-at-home labels at https://stampnik.com/

disclaimer: founder of Stampnik

Any they deliver on Sundays!

If you want your package to get there slower than walking it, then yeah you can use USPS. Honestly I do everything I can to not use them at this point.

USPS priority has been amazingly predictable for me all year, even through all the pre-election noise. I think they were 19 for 20 in being on-time to their estimate (including several of Saturday mail, Monday deliveries 600-900 miles away). The 1 that missed missed by a day.

I have had had some terrible parcel post experiences, but priority has been good.

I've had 5 packages this year take longer than two weeks priority. One not of those five was 40 minutes away that took 8 days to arrive. I've had stuff sit in post offices so long I had to call to make sure they weren't lost. Another item get marked delivered in a different zip code than my own, only when I opened a case was the package thrown on the ground in front of our mail box cluster. I can't tell you how many packages marked as delivered only to be delivered the next day.

I know some people who work in shipping and logistics, and they predicted this months ago. The word "shippingpocalypse" was used as early as August. It's not unexpected if you've had your ear to the ground of the shipping business.

Why not ship-pocalypse?

a-post-alypse.

Know of any good sites / resources for me to stay abreast of the business?

http://www.thepostalhub.com/

Consider also that many of these groups are also dealing with the on-going uncertainty of "What's going to happen with Brexit and cross-Channel logistics?" at the same time.

This seems to be great for Amazon. I've been a real Amazon critic for a lot of the typical reasons, so I've tended to buy elsewhere if possible, although I would still occasionally buy from Amazon for a great price or whatever.

This morning I checked in on 3 outstanding orders I made over a week ago with 3 separate merchants, none of which appear to have shipped. I'm guessing they're in this quagmire. But I keep seeing Amazon deliveries (Christmas presents from the in-laws) arrive on time.

At this point, if there was something I needed soon, I'd probably hold my nose and use Amazon for it. The monster knows how to deliver.

Is Amazon using UPS for your address? It seems they prefer different couriers depending on your address. At my last address (about an hour from the Riverside CA warehouse), they used Amazon Logistics almost every time, but here (an hour and a half from the Avenal NJ one), they use USPS more.

I get packages using pretty much all options (Amazon, UPS, and USPS), but I'm in an area where there's a fulfillment center pretty close (north Houston area)

My recent Amazon purchases have had an extra day of delivery time in the estimate - three days instead of the typical two. Yet despite the delivery estimate adding a day to delivery time all arrived at the normal time - a day ahead of schedule. That's not a bad experience.

I'd honestly rather they simply lower their shipping volumes than continue to hire random schmoes to deliver packages in their personal vehicles with no company identification at all. They pull through my front drive so they can save walking an extra 5 feet, then they bust my sprinklers and christmas lights on the way out. Fortunately they left a sample of the MLM garbage they hawk with their name and number on it so I don't have to fight UPS to figure out how to yell at them.

I'm sorry about your sprinkler, just remember that delivery person was probably having a hard day too.

This frustration UPS and FedEx are causing may make any shipping company Amazon wants to start up for other companies something that will gain traction.

Odds are that most of the traffic Fedex and UPS are getting is from Amazon, and the little guys are getting shut out.

I don't think that's the case.

At least where I'm at, almost none of my Amazon orders come through fedex or UPS now - everything is delivered by an Amazon driver. And they have an incredible amount of Amazon vans running around. I went to lunch the other day and counted 3 within a mile of my house.

That does make me wonder how they optimize routes. That and the fact that I had 4 different drivers leave a package at my house the other day.

> At least where I'm at, almost none of my Amazon orders come through fedex or UPS now - everything is delivered by an Amazon driver.

That only means the 'last mile' (figurative here) is done by Amazon. I believe there may still be third parties in between depending on the item/location.

I think that's even less likely to be true - Amazon had been doing long-haul trucking for quite a few years and letting UPS/Fedex/USPS do last mile delivery for them. I can't imagine they went backwards on that just because they ramped up last mile delivery.

In Germany Amazon is using third party carriers for the the first and middle mile of their own courier network, meaning the route from the FC to a sort center and between sort centers. That these trucks are Amazon branded doesn't mean they are owned and operated by them. This is not the core business of UPS and FedEx, so.

In contrast we’ve got four or five UPS trucks (which are quite a bit bigger) down at the ‘local watering hole’ at lunch time every day. My town has a population of about four thousand. Of course you can’t really tell because at least FedEx and Amazon have been making deliveries from rental trucks, and then there are the Lyft-like deliver people driving around with Toyota’s full of packages.

YMM but, in my area Amazon is only doing the last mile delivery. Theres a large parking lot in the industrial part of town where you can watch UPS, FedEx, and OnTrac branded trucks and van load packages into Amazon branded vans. The same type of van to van transfer seems to be happening pretty regularly at the local UPS store as well.

Amazon is doing their own last-mile delivery when that's profitable, doing long-haul delivery when that's profitable, and using UPS/USPS/FedEx for any other segment.

Just to round out the annecdata a bit, in my area Amazon has absolutely no last-mile presence. Virtually all of my Amazon packages are delivered by UPS (very occasionally last-mile is handled by USPS).

Fedex stopped being a carrier for Amazon (I think earlier this year).

Most of it is from a record breaking BFCM. People shopped online instead of going to the mall. Network is over capacity. UPS is hit the hardest because they took new business in without having the capacity. Capacity goes like this. Carrier has X capacity. At 2X capacity stuff starts to fall apart which is your normal BFCM. We’re at 8X capacity. Stuff is just sitting in trailers and probably won’t get handled till next week that’s if you can get your stuff picked up.

The FedEx depot near me had stuff sitting in trailers for 3+ weeks, most of the summer. To the point that you have to call the seller and ask them to extend the return window in case your thing arrives damaged, because you haven't even seen it yet but the normal return period is about to close...

I can't imagine what they're going through right now.

Fedex explicitly dropped Amazon as a customer earlier this year.

It's about time for AWS to launch SPS (Simple Parcel Service).

After retailers feel the pain this year, I suspect many would be interested to ship through Amazon's logistics network...

You already can if you use FBA, but then you still have the problem of getting your packages to their warehouses.

I wonder if their uber-style delivery-network can also handle pickups... that removes the need to ship in advanced to their warehouse

Amazon offers third party logistics for non amazon.com sales

Here's an idea! Pay USPS to ship your parcels! They are a branch of the government and are required to carry your parcels!

USPS is already swamped (and fedex/ups are dumping tons of load on them). Yes they are required to accept and deliver, but it might take a few months.

So, They are renting their own trucks for last mile in some cases. But it is just a pick up per day limit. No mention of if you take it to a shipping location yourself. Bitch to bitch, but take care of your customers.

How expensive could it be to rent your own truck and deliver it yourself to a fedex/ups sorting center? Seems weird that retailers are complaining over a $100 cost (very generous estimate) spread over 100+ packages.

How many trucks are available for rental? Can every shipper get one? Can small shippers organize cooperatives to get access to them? Who's going to drive them?

>How many trucks are available for rental? Can every shipper get one?

Isn't the car rental industry in shambles due to covid-19? There's probably plenty of trucks (or similar vehicles such as SUVs/minivans) available for rent for cheap.

>Can small shippers organize cooperatives to get access to them?

Small shippers likely won't face issues with volume, and even if they do they can use their own personal vehicles.

>Who's going to drive them?

All the people unemployed from covid?

> Isn't the car rental industry in shambles due to covid-19? There's probably plenty of trucks (or similar vehicles such as SUVs/minivans) available for rent for cheap.

I've been renting a full size pickup truck from my local enterprise RAC for less than the price of their cheapest sedan over the last month, but my friends renting uhauls have had a lot of trouble getting them.

Depending on how motivated you are, pickups are the most popular vehicle on the road and we already know that gig drivers will happily take up the slack for a few bucks.

> Seems weird that retailers are complaining over a $100 cost (very generous estimate) spread over 100+ packages

Some counterpoints:

- 100 as a cost for a truck run sounds like it could be a little low; you've got to load/unload them, and I'm not certain what the drop-off process looks like if you have more than a couple packages. I know from experience, loading up a van full of 50 PCs and monitors, driving to a location, and unloading, then driving back is a 1-2ish hour job for two people. (And in that case, the Van was already owned.) Yes that's a bit more of an 'extreme' example but since Newegg was one of the impacted retailers it felt like a relevant example.

- Online retail's 'Race to the bottom' has eliminated for many industries the ability to buffer for cost shifts like this. By that I mean, 100$ over 100 packages would still be an extra dollar per package. But if you're selling 5-10$ gloves, that 1$ may be cutting your profits in half.

If you get a truck, that would be 100 for the truck, and the driver is most likely on the payroll already. Being a big enough shipper, you should get the loading equipment from UPs, if you don't have it already. Preload the goods, roll them on your truck, deliver them to depot and roll them of again. Or use pallets, if UPS is ok with that.

Getting the slots at the UPS depot might be tricky, so. It shouldn't be such a huge cost driver, so.

The driver might be on the payroll, but you need to hire someone else then to do whatever job the driver was doing before.

Oh, and better check with your insurance and local laws. When you pay someone to drive for you all sorts of regulations come into play.

True that! Maybe a good reason to not use semi trucks, driving times are less strict for 3.5 tons over here. If it is not getting out of hand, these things should still manageable, so. Also playing with specific pick up schedules and ship methods, e.g. express vs. standard, can help. All in all some very nice Q4 stuff!

>you should get the loading equipment from UPs

I work at UPS. We hand-load and unload everything. The loading equipment is a guy. If there is palletized volume then once it gets to the hub the pallet is broken down. When a trailer is being unloaded a worker is physically inside the trailer grabbing each and every individual package and placing them on a conveyor belt that takes the package to be sorted. Irregular packages (exceptional size, weight) are pushed out of the trailer and then loaded onto another, larger belt. This process may differ at other facilities, but that’s how it works in Raleigh, NC.

it seems very unlikely that you would need to rent a truck for 100 packages of gloves.

I've dealt directly with this issue, and I would say that $100 is nowhere near enough.

Daily costs might look like this for the operation I was involved in (Cap. hill Seattle).

Rent a truck for a day (if available. every other business is trying to do the same thing): $20

Insurance for rented truck: $20

Parking for rented truck: $25

Loading, driving, and unloading truck 2x people for 1.5 hours at holiday rates $20/hr (if you can spare the labor, hiring someone you can trust to drive a truck/van is harder than it sounds): $60

Mileage charge for U-Haul ($1 per mile): $5

I would say that $130 is an absolute bare minimum to budget for. Keeping in mind that the shipper is still charging you the same amount as they were for pickup service. Logistics is hard.

$100 is nowhere near enough, but you estimate it at $105 with a $25 parking fee?

The OP said that $100 was a generous max high end.

I estimated $130 as an absolute bare minimum for the operation I was familiar with, it was based on the real world.

Feel free to take away the parking for a location that doesn't have paid parking. But make sure to factor in that the mileage and labor hours must also go up if the depot is farther away.

The larger point is that it is an additional expense and operation that small businesses need to deal with at the busiest time of year.

The cost of the rental truck may be the least important piece of this equation. Depending on the pickup shortfall, I could easily see the need for multiple trucks needing to go to each carrier's facility.

You're also going to multiple employees per truck, with at least one being more senior since there could be tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise.

They'll need to get to the carrier facility and make sure the boxes are scanned, because they are now a variable in the transport, and it would look bad if a box went missing and supposedly never made it to the carrier. At the warehouse we have cameras that make it unnecessary to watch the boxes being scanned. Not to mention customers check tracking like hawks and would call and take up support resources wondering about their box that "shipped" but the tracking page says "Fedex is waiting on your box to arrive".

On top of this, carrier pickups are typically scheduled as late as possible. We lobbied heavily for our UPS / Fedex pickups to be 6pm (or later during peak). So you're going to need to send employees to the carrier at 6:30pm or later, dropping the truck off at the warehouse at 7:30 (at the earliest) after loading/unloading/scanning (It was a 15 min drive to the carrier center).

So they're getting home at 8pm, and need to be back at the warehouse at 7am to pick all the orders for the next day.

> Seems weird that retailers are complaining over a $100 cost (very generous estimate) spread over 100+ packages.

Well if you were making $1 profit on each package you've now got a serious problem haven't you?

As I've repeated above, this is not a pick up per day limit. This is a package scanned per day limit. We were told explicitly that they would turn us away and place a hold on our account if we brought them to the hub ourselves. I even offered to drive to major hubs hours away if it meant getting this packages injected into the system.

In what world is this unexpected? Everybody who works in e-commerce has been expecting this (or other consequences like 10 day delays). At least since Black Friday.

I've been seeing UPS lately using standard vehicles (cars/vans) to handle a ton of deliveries in my area. It's uncanny seeing the brown uniformed guy, jumping out of a standard Toyota Corolla.

They often do that during the holidays. A few years ago I even saw them driving around my subdivision in a golf cart with a tiny trailer attached.

I have a friend who's a UPS delivery driver and he's sent photos before of his truck when he first sees it in the morning.

It's so full of boxes/packages he can't even walk into it. Super disorganized. All just stuffed anywhere they can be by the loading crew. Strewn about the floor.

But he's sent similar photos in the past as well. So I can't imagine how much worse it can get.

I was a truck loader for UPS for one holiday season. They always maximize the truck space with boxes wedged up to the ceiling. But if they are short-staffed they will have too few loaders for too many trucks and the packages won't be arranged in a findable way for the delivery drivers. The trucks would actually be less full since the loaders won't have time to play Tetris with the boxes.

Ah, yeah that's a great point. Definitely don't think they're taking advantage of all the possible space. I feel like drivers have a bit of a thankless job. I definitely appreciate them more after learning this kind of stuff.

That is standard peak practices, trust me I have seens trucks so full you can barely open any of the doors. It looks disorganized but is not as bad as you think.

Well, considering my friend has said he sometimes will get to work extra early so he can unload and try to re-load and organize his load I'd say it's still fairly bad.

Sounds like he has a bad and /or inexperienced loader(s), but in their defense sometimes, especially during peak, the volume on the belt is so much that you can barely pull your work off the belt much less think about where it has to be loaded.. usually you stack everything until volume slows down, then you load it. But in peak there is never a slowdown, its just balls to wall the entire time, everyone in the entire facility has been stacking out boxes so everything is piled up everywhere, sometimes this goes on for 7 or 8 hours or more in the midst of the peak season. Eventually, the driver gets there for their shift and its huge pressure to just get everything loaded so the driver can get out of there.

This explains why so many of our orders have been shipped (and thus far, 100% lost) via Lasership.

I for one would much prefer later delivery in exchange for the piece of mind (and functional tracking website) associated with ups and to a lesser extent, USPS.

I would trust Uber or Lyft to handle last mile, but the logistics involved in the preceding miles are anything but trivial!

Considering I have multiple packages with UPS of which all previous tracking status has been removed and replaced with simply "Delayed" without any other information, and at least one has been that way for over a week, I'm not sure exactly what piece of mind or tracking functionality you're talking about.

I got the message "unforseen circumstances / returned to seller" on a recent purchase for tracking. The seller refunded the package automatically which was nice. Then it still showed up.

As a customer, guess what? I get it, it'll take longer to get my stuff. No big deal. It means a lot of people are being responsible, shopping online, and hopefully sending gifts rather than spreading COVID. Retailers should just not make shipping promises they can't keep, reasonable people will understand.

Mail is vital to so much of the economy. This horror story is exactly why it’s a good thing for everyone if the country has a well-functioning postal service that serves as national infrastructure rather than a profit-generating enterprise. But I guess that’s a controversial statement these days. Sigh.

If it’s vital to so much of the economy it shouldn’t have a problem charging profitable rates.

Research would indicate the rates are profitable as mandated by law. It is irresponsible to spread misinformation on the internet.

I don’t understand the argument you are trying to make. That price controls are good? Or that a national carrier will always be profitable because they can just jack up their rates?

USPS is legally required to charge rates that don't result in a marginal loss.

The USPS cannot "jack up the rates". The USPS cannot change prices to increase revenue. The USPS prices are set by legislation, and cannot be changed. The USPS is not intended to make a profit, and is intended to provide a public good. Implying that the prices can/should be changed is spreading misinformation.

The USPS is profitable on the delivery side. If they were allowed to operate as a normal business they would have more revenue than Fedex and UPS. Their free flow cash margins have been positive since 2013. They would be VERY profitable except for legislative meddling.

However, they have a number of legislative mandates that suck up their profits.

The biggest is that they have to have cash on hand to pay out employee pensions for the next 75 years.

Everything that they make goes into a giant pot of money for the retirement fund of workers that haven't been born yet. The holdings must be in cash, so they can't even invest this giant pot of money. This was a law pushed through by conservatives with the seeming intent to ensure that the USPS is never profitable. It is a mandate that literally no other organization is saddled with.

Other legislative blocks to profitability: They ae required to deliver lettermail to every address in the US for the same rate. They don't get to set the rates for lettermail.

They are prohibited from offering additional services through their branches such as copy and print services.

They are prohibited by law from participating in banking and money services except for legacy paper money orders. Online service is strictly prohibited.

Besides all that, there is no reason that a service considered vital to the economy has to be profitable. The postal service is one of the few essential government services that is expected to make money for some reason. We don't expect the fire department to be revenue positive even though they are allowed to charge basically anything they want for ambulance service.

As an anecdata aside: I've lived in a few countries where postal service is less than reliable (don't know when the mail will come, deliverability rates are pretty bad.). It is not a desirable state of affairs. I remember my mom having to plan half a day to pay bills. She would have to go to the office, or an approved payment processor for the company and wait in line to make a payment for each bill. Contrast that with dropping a check in the mail. The internet has changed a lot of things since then, but I still see a mail service as required.

Considering how many public institutions are having pension fund issues I have a hard time being upset that at least one of them is being forced to make sure they can actually follow through with the promises, even if the rules are excessive

>The biggest is that they have to have cash on hand to pay out employee pensions for the next 75 years.

>Everything that they make goes into a giant pot of money for the retirement fund of workers that haven't been born yet. The holdings must be in cash, so they can't even invest this giant pot of money.

This is not true. The law only requires saving money for accrued benefits, which makes sense to me. See section 802 and 803 of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006:

https://www.congress.gov/109/plaws/publ435/PLAW-109publ435.p...

This is how deferred compensation should work. If an employer offers deferred compensation, they should be saving sufficient funds such that even if income were to stop today, the accrued benefits would have no problem being paid from the savings.

>This was a law pushed through by conservatives with the seeming intent to ensure that the USPS is never profitable.

This is also true, and the proof is "conservatives" exempted governments from the rules it wants the USPS to follow. Politicians do not want to force proper funding of government employee benefits, as then they could not advertise low taxes to voters at the same time they advertise higher compensation (via benefits in retirement) to government employee unions.

>It is a mandate that literally no other organization is saddled with.

Non taxpayer funded organizations do have similar mandates. See Pension Protection Act of 2006.

I did repeat some lies. Thanks for pushing on me to do my research better, haha.

I looked into the details to clarify:

The USPS has to have the cash on hand to pay earned benefits 50 years out. That is unique to the postal service.

The same act also mandated that price hikes at the USPS never move faster than inflation. Very few businesses would want to operate in an environment where you're biggest liability is future healthcare costs of employees, and your revenue is tied to inflation adjusted 2006 prices....

The Pension Protection act does make pension funding more regulated, but the requirements are nowhere near requiring cash on hand to fund 50 years of obligations. Other pensions are also allowed to have assets that aren't cash, meaning they can grow.

The larger point I was making, which I think is supported either way, is that the USPS is actually a viable business. The consistent profit loss is based on legislative mandates that their competitors, or anyone else, don't have to abide by.

>The USPS has to have the cash on hand to pay earned benefits 50 years out. That is unique to the postal service.

I do not see this in the text of the law in sections 802 or 803. Where is this information about specifically having "cash on hand" and "50 years out"?

>The same act also mandated that price hikes at the USPS never move faster than inflation. Very few businesses would want to operate in an environment where you're biggest liability is future healthcare costs of employees, and your revenue is tied to inflation adjusted 2006 prices....

The USPS is unfairly handicapped by being legislated to be operated as a businesses, yet somehow also legislated to have maximum prices. However, you don't have to be an actuary to know that no entity can possibly make good on offering healthcare for the entire life of their employees unless they have a money printing machine (aka federal government).

>The larger point I was making, which I think is supported either way, is that the USPS is actually a viable business. The consistent profit loss is based on legislative mandates that their competitors, or anyone else, don't have to abide by.

I agree with the sentiment of this statement, but I disagree that their competitors (namely UPS and FedEx) don't have to abide by similar legislative mandates. As far as I know, no company provides ridiculous benefits such as healthcare after you retire. And if it did, it would be similarly screwed as USPS.

Is it unfair that Congress forced USPS to actually set aside money for the healthcare that they promised their employees? Maybe the amortization schedule is unfair, but it should have been in effect a long time ago, one could make the argument that USPS prices have been too low considering the lavish benefits they have been promising. However, I also know that Congress has hamstrung USPS from actually being able to properly operate as a business.

Bottom line, USPS is a whipping boy for Congress, but the problem isn't the proper requirements to set aside funds for promised benefits. The problem is Congress using USPS as a political tool, simultaneously not letting them operate as a business, and not letting them have access to the money printing abilities of the federal government.

IMO it's important to separate the economic infra and the public utility portions of it -- but economies of scale might be had when combined.

Some retailer getting their consumer product shipped to a customer is not a problem for the government to solve. Getting medicine to someone in need is. It's hard because on the surface they seem the same, but systems that functions like the former and latter have very different economics (say in the fail case) and their budgets/designs have to match the needs.

USPS barely breaks even plus or minus a couple percent any given year while also being financially prudent with its pension obligations and substantial federal oversight that keeps it from doing particularly slimy things to make a buck.

All the "hurr durr it should be nationalized" and "hurr durr it should be privatized" noise is just the partisan hacks from both sides doing their thing. It's pretty much fine as it is, even if its service level for parcels is slightly worse than the private carriers

The day the US military shows a profit I will start to care about the USPS, actually no, I still won't care. It's not a business, it's a service. "partisan hacks", please take your "both sides" and leave, it's not even remotely close to the truth.

> substantial federal oversight that keeps it from doing particularly slimy things to make a buck.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm sure you couldn't be talking about attempts to let USPS provide basic banking services.

> prudent

USPS has a pension funding burden that no other entity in the USA operates under.

Without that they would be doing just fine.

Why does anyone provide a pension now? 401ks are much more financially prudent.

It's mostly taxpayer funded entities that provide defined benefit pensions now, since in the US, they are exempt from any laws about setting aside any money for the future benefits.

This works well for politicians and senior government employee union members, who can be promised lavish benefits in the near term, at the same time as advertising low taxes to the non government employee voters since they can just make up numbers for how much they need to save to pay the benefits.

They won't do it so brazenly as to simply set aside $0 for benefits promised today, but it happens by using extremely liberal discount rates (~8%) to make future liabilities look less than they are. For reference, non taxpayer funded entities are subject to Pension Protection Act of 2006, which requires pension plans to use highly rated corporate bond yield curves, around ~4%. Each percentage increase in discount rate, roughly, makes the amount of money you need to save today 10% to 20% less (since you're assuming greater investment returns).

Legislators can also just not pay the recommended amount. For example, in a government pension plan, the actuaries comes back with a funding recommendation of $1B to pay for the benefits accrued this year (which is already understating costs due to liberal assumptions). The leaders or legislators will just say we don't have $1B this year, but let's do $500M, and then amortize the rest over the next 10 years. Maybe the governor or mayor promised no tax increases, maybe they want to push tax increases or budget cuts to after they move onto their next political office.

You can keep this rob the future to pay for today scheme going for a few decades while people are having lots of kids and the tax base is growing and income from taxes is growing. But it comes to a head, like it is now, eventually.

All non taxpayer funded entities operate with similar requirements for funding of deferred benefits such as defined benefit pensions.

See Pension Protection Act of 2006 and Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006.

USPS had a pass for a long time and get passed back and forth as government and non government for political purposes, but if you don't have access to the federal government's money printing abilities, there's no reason you should not be subject to funding requirements.

Considering that damn near every public entity manages to run their pension fund into the ground I would call it prudent.

And my whole point is that in light of that burden they're doing fine.

Yeah but the restriction on USPS is good and should apply to the rest as well, not the other way around.

If, for example, the DOD had to pre-fund pensions the way USPS does, either your taxes would go up by ~30%, or half of the actively serving military would be given a pink slip by next Thursday.

Sounds good to me.

In a world where we're running $3.1T/yr deficit, why wouldn't we just crank that number even higher? Either way, it's a future obligation of the federal government, but it doesn't mean it's going to come out of taxes now (even though it perhaps should)

Usps literally requires an act of congress to change their rates. Needless to say there haven’t been any in quite some time. They lose money hand over fist and require bailouts and other financial games to keep operating.

For delivery of retail parcels to private consumers? No that should be part of what retailers pay for when they sell remotely. It's a cost of doing business and absolutely not the responsibility of the taxpayers.

You could apply this argument to everything the government is involved in as well. Why shouldn't retails pay for the roads we all drive on that lets customers reach them, electricity, police and fire and so on

Has USPS announced any limits?

I don't have any sources but anecdotally I would say that one of my packages has a status of "delayed"

It arrived in my state, about a 45 minute drive from me on Sunday, and it is not expected to arrive until Friday. presumable sitting in a warehouse in a queue of things to go out

I currently have multiple USPS packages (incoming and outgoing) that have statuses of "In Transit, Arriving Late" and have not been scanned for many days. One package was last updated 13 days ago. An acquaintance who sells things online is seeing the same thing, packages in transit with no updates for 1-2 weeks.

It's possible we've just been unlucky and these packages are lost, but it could also be indicative of a larger logistical problem with USPS.

I shipped a package from Chicago to Baltimore last month. Based on tracking info, the USPS had it on a truck within hours. To Wichita. It made it through the distribution center there and back on a truck within another few hours, where it showed up in Washington DC 6 days later. And now I guess it's heading to Baltimore. Or at least I hope so.

My daughter sends books via media mail to a friend in suburban NYC. For basically pocket change, they get there in 3 days or so.

Merchants don’t ship USPS except last mile or to Alaska/Hawaii. It is either UPS, Fedex or DHL doing the pick up, transporting it local post office and USPS does last mile delivery for under a pound packages. Larger packages the carriers deliver themselves.

That does not match my experience in NY suburbs. Amazon is evenly split between UPS and USPS. Other merchants are Fedex Home Delivery, UPS or USPS also fairly evenly split.

Amazon isn’t a traditional retailer and has unique contracts with USPS including Sunday delivery.

Tons of retailers use USPS, they are quite competitive especially for whatever fits into an envelope (First Class Mail). You don't seem to have a grasp of the industry, might be better not to make stuff up.

Name one major merchant that uses USPS outside of shipping to Alaska and Hawaii? You do know that things delivered by USPS does mean it was shipped via USPS right? You know about smart post or surepost and how they work? I find it funny you said I don’t have a grasp, if you view my history you see jobs postings from companies I’ve built including one that does 2mm shipments a month with a negotiated USPS deal with similar rates to amazon.

There is a highly contagious and deadly virus spreading in an uncontrolled fashion. Can't everyone just give everyone a break? For late gifts, for delayed logistic operations?

That's a reasonable perspective, but often it's one-sided. Both Fedex and UPS suspended their on-time guarantee, for example, but they haven't reduced their fees. Meanwhile, it's been a boon for the stock price of Fedex (up 100% from a year ago) and UPS (33%)

Its basically been peak season since covid hit, and we can't use helpers in the same way this year. The belts and facilities are going to be a shit show beyond anything UPS has had to deal with, I know they are already. Many are already so worn out, this was bound to be a tough peak season and everyone knows it..

Thanks for the insight. Obviously all of you working in the trenches have had a hard year, and we may not know just how hard it has been. We all are thankful for the role you've played keeping things going. Hopefully the decisions being made by the higher ups are being made to benefit their customers and their workers.

This is not a problem, this is an opportunity.

So, anyone here still think it's a good idea to privatize postal delivery?

Is USPS doing any better?

Anecdotally, I'm getting my neighbors mail several times a month. I can only speculate about how much of my mail gets delivered elsewhere.

They're not literally saying to people, with no notice, that "no, we won't accept this mailpiece" so yes, I think they're doing better.

Privatizing the mail doesn't magically prevent delivery mistakes from happening, despite what you appear to be suggesting.

You don't understand what is happening. UPS made this mistake once and is not going to do it again.

For business customers, accepting a package and failing to deliver for the holidays is WORSE than accepting (a la USPS) with no limits and then having it get stuck.

UPS did this to amazon once, and that was enough for Amazon to decide to build out its own delivery network.

Shippers can do all sorts of things to help make things efficient if UPS communicates the limits. Ie, no sales with guaranteed 2 day shipping 2 days before xmass.

So you still think it's a good thing that a private company should be handling important infrastructure and be able to say, on a whim, "Nop, we're not going to handle this because reasons. Sorry not sorry."

How can you say for certainty that they won't do it again? Are you in a leadership position at UPS where you're able to make that assertion?

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

https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.acti...

The USPS already scans the exterior of every letter they deliver (perhaps a result of the 2001 anthrax attacks?). They let you see the scans online. You don't have to "speculate" about losing mail.

The privacy implications suck, but c'est la vie.

It seems that FedEx and UPS are being tapped into for expedient Covid19 vaccine distribution. I wonder if these limits are in any way connected to capacity planning for distribution of the vaccine.

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