From USA Today:
“Delays in
holiday deliveries, delays in returns, plague small businesses”
For Mark Baker,
the president and CIO (chief idea originator) for The Vermont Flannel Co.,
delays in deliveries of flannel blankets, pajamas, shirts, hoodies and scarves
to customers this holiday season was just one more blow in a year packed with
punches. First, his homegrown manufacturing operations had to shut down for
four months, which was hard to recover from. Then, his five Vermont retail
stores were hit by the drop in tourism. Thankfully, online sales made up some
of the difference. "But we had numerous delivery problems the last couple
of months with UPS, with FedEx and with USPS," Baker said. "We used
all three depending on where our flannel blankets were going and how many
people were buying." Baker said a U.S. Postal Service employee told him
that parcels had not been touched at one of the distribution facilities for
three weeks – and that was in November. "That made us scramble to do more
with FedEx," Baker said. "We also changed out our marketing,
encouraging people to purchase gift certificates that could be sent
instantaneously via email."
All across the
country, small businesses and their customers faced the same dilemma. Thanks to
the coronavirus pandemic, shoppers purchased far more than usual online all
year long, and the holiday season only added to the surging demand for
e-commerce deliveries. FedEx Ground alone handled 45.5 million packages during
the 12 months ended Nov. 30, up 24% from the same period a year earlier. UPS
moved 67.6 million packages for the 12 months ended June 30, a 13% jump from a
year earlier. Meanwhile, spikes in
COVID-19 illnesses and quarantines among delivery workers contributed to
processing delays. Nearly 30,000 of the Postal Service's 644,000 workers,
tested positive for COVID-19 this year, according to the Postal Service. "The
Postal Service delivered a record amount of packages this holiday season in the
midst of the pandemic which significantly impacted our workforce
availability," said Kim Frum, senior public relations representative for
the Postal Service. "Capacity challenges with airlifts and trucking for
moving this historic volume of mail also led to temporary delays. These
challenges were felt by shippers across the board."
Angry
messages With more and more packages
piling up between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Postal Service was soon
buried under parcels. At some distribution facilities, workers found it
difficult to walks around and trucks were unable to unload others. Customers
sent angry messages because orders didn't arrive by Christmas, demanding their
money back, and small businesses faced their wrath. "Now, here we
are right after Christmas, and we're in return season, which will last till the
end of January," said Cathy Roberson, a former UPS employee who runs
Logistics Trends and Insight, a market research firm based in Atlanta.
"But the post office needs to finish delivering Christmas packages first.
Keep in mind this has been an unusual year. Volume is up by a lot. Delays were
expected, but not by this amount." Roberson said if she was a
customer and hadn't gotten her Christmas package yet, she wouldn't be a happy
camper. But she added that too much of the blame for the delays is being laid
at the feet of small businesses and the Postal Service, and that's not fair.
Like everything in business, delivering packages comes down to supply and
demand, and UPS and FedEx are in a much better position to manage surging
demand than the Postal Service, Roberson said. That's because they're able to
say no.
When demand
increased for their services this year, UPS and FedEx raised rates, capped
volumes and limited the number of trailers available for large and small
customers. As a result, much of their
excess business got shunted over to the Postal Service, and it wasn't ready. The
Postal Service knows it needs to upgrade its package operations to support the
increasing volumes, Roberson said. However, the upgrades have been slow. "The
post office cannot turn down mail," Roberson added. "They can turn
down packages, but it's very, very rare that they do that. They're trying to
build up their parcel capacity. They know that's where the money is and there
are expectations from the government and from the market that they get there.
So they're stuck between a rock and a hard place." Plus, amid a contentious election with a
massive increase in mail-in voting, the topic of mail and delivery turned
political in 2020. "If they had come out and said they couldn't handle the
volume, can you imagine the political backlash?" she said. The Postal
Service became the catchall provider, Roberson said. Not only did it catch all
or most of the excess packages. It caught all or most of the blame for the
delays.
Raising
spirits For OTT Enterprises LLC, a
St. Louis company that makes Big O Ginger Liqueur and Habondia Peach Brandy, it
was UPS that was responsible for delivery delays during its all-important
Christmas season. "We understand they're trying to deal with this
huge volume and more workers are getting sick," said Bill Foster, a former
English professor who founded the company with his wife in 2009. "But we
had more shipments get damaged this year than ever before. We even had some
things disappear, literally fall off the truck." Foster added that
UPS also took longer to pick up palettes from the distillery, which made the
product slightly more expensive, causing someone, somewhere down the line to
pay a little bit more.Overall, Foster said his sales are down 23% this year
from 2019, which is not terrible for a fledgling spirits manufacturer at a time
when bars and restaurants have been closed and face-to-face marketing and
tastings have been impossible. The holiday season was critically
important, Foster said. That's when his company does 50% of its business, and
fortunately, shipping delays did not cost him customers. "We did
have a number of folks contact us that shipments took longer than expected,
though," he said.
David Malka saw
the same problems on a much larger scale. The chief sales officer of goTRG, a
company that processes returns for some of the biggest retailers and
manufacturers in the country including Walmart, Lowe's, Dell and Lenovo, Malka
uses UPS, FedEx and the Postal Service to ship packages to e-commerce
customers, stores and manufacturers, and 2020 saw a more than 40% increase in
its already massive shipping volumes. Then, the Christmas season came. "Nobody
had a crystal ball and knew how hard carriers would be slammed with packages,
but we certainly weren't expecting that limits would be put on clients,"
Malka said. "We were ready at our facilities and were fulfilling orders as
quickly as possible only to find out that FedEx and UPS capped the number of
packages we could send per day because there were too many packages in the
network." Malka said if he had known that ahead of time, he would have
diverted the packages to another carrier. But he didn't find out until after
Cyber Monday when the packages were already sitting on the loading dock. "Now it seems USPS is the one paying the
price for all the delays," Malka said. "But it was the other carriers
that first put limits on what they would pick up, and then that businesses got
diverted to USPS." As an example of the scale of the problem, Malka said
that the FedEx facility in Lowell, Arkansas had a capacity to handle 60,000
packages a day, and goTRG alone handed them 25,000 packages on Black Friday. "If
we gave them that volume, imagine how many packages they were getting from all
their other vendors," Malka said.
Northern
lights Up in Anchorage, Alaska,
however, the mail has been one of the few bright spots this dismal year. Jana
Hayenga, who owns and operates three gift stores – Cabin Fever, The Quilted
Raven and Wooly Mammoth – that once profited from the lucrative cruise
business, said the Postal Service did a good job getting quilting kits,
calendars and other gifts to customers this holiday season. "Customers
told us they were getting packages in a day or two," Hayenga said. She couldn't explain it. Maybe it's an
Alaska thing. But it certainly was welcome in a city where she has not ordered
any new inventory since March 2019, where she's just been selling what she has
because tourism traffic has completely dried up and she's not sure when people
will be willing to go cruising again. "There's a lot of businesses
up here that aren't going to make it," Hayenga said. "We could be one
of them." At least online sales of quilting kits have taken off and
there haven't been any problems with deliveries.
^ I have found
UPS to be the better out of USPS and FedEx. The USPS is simply a failed-organization
that needs to be shut-down after January 20, 2021, modernized and then reopened.
I am waiting on packages and presents to arrive too. What really gets me is the
tracking numbers sometimes show that an item was so close and yet still haven’t
arrived. A friend ordered a Christmas present for me and sent me the USPS
Tracking Number for it. I tracked it and found that it was only 3 hours away
and was there from December 15-December 30th when it was shipped
down to Florida instead of continuing to New England where I live. It has yet
to arrive. ^
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