BrownCafe

Some employers are desperate to find workers for the holiday season, so they’re trying all sorts of things to fill positions, including hiring new workers in 30 minutes or less. NPR’s Andrea Hsu has the story.

ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: At 6 p.m., the UPS hub in Westchester, Pa., is a bustling scene. There’s a line of brown delivery trucks zooming in and out. Thousands of packages travel along conveyor belts and slide down chutes.

CHRIS BOOTS: We’re sorting them, we’re separating them by zip codes and where they need to go and reloading the trucks.

HSU: Chris Boots started at UPS three months ago as a package handler after losing his job as an event planner at the start of the pandemic. His timing was good; in late August, UPS introduced an expedited hiring process.

BOOTS: Yeah, it was actually very convenient.

It’s a blessing that many of us can have just about anything we want or need delivered to our doorstep, but that means someone has to be out there pounding the pavement and spending long days on the road so we can benefit.

One of those people is Anthony Gaskin. He’s an unassuming man, always ready with a wave and a smile for residents as he brings them the packages they’ve been anxiously awaiting.

So on Dec. 15, 2020, those residents in Midlothian, Virginia, decided to let him know just how much he meant to them with an amazing turnout of people lining the road to honk horns, hold signs and cheer the delivery man on.

A UPS driver shut down critics who question why UPS drivers make so much money with a viral TikTok showing just how many boxes he delivers.

Aiden (@aiden_m365) is a UPS driver and TikTok content creator with 3.2 million followers. He regularly posts videos of TikTok trends and his everyday life. His TikTok video demonstrating the number of packages he delivers in just one shift went viral, with 1.9 million views and 180,500 likes in 2 days.

Text overlay on Aiden’s video reads, “Idk why they get paid so much. All they do is deliver packages. Can’t be that hard.”

Captioned “But I love it,” the 12-second video shows his truck completely filled with boxes at the start of his shift at 8:45am and then totally empty by 2:45pm.

UPS sports attractively priced premiums at the moment, too

United Parcel Service, Inc. (NYSE:UPS) is up 0.9% to trade at $205.58 this morning, after the shipping giant earned an upgrade from Citigroup to “buy” from “neutral,” and a price-target hike to $250 from $245. The analyst in question noted the company’s strong domestic growth prospects, and that UPS is now moving to reduce risks associated with Amazon.com (AMZN) being one of its largest customers.

Analysts were evenly split towards the equity coming into today, with 10 sporting a “strong buy” rating, while the remaining 10 said “hold” or worse. Meanwhile, the 12-month consensus target price of $230.91 is a 12.6% premium to the stock’s current perch.