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Comment by downrightmike | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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