See....it wasn't just incompetence.

[scratch]

I wouldn't want to turn down packages as much as make it crystal clear that there are no guarantees on delivery dates due to last minute volume.

I think they knew good and well that they were overloading the system and were expecting failures. It was just worser than the shippers and UPS expected.

 

[nocturnalbuck]

Im willing to bet UPS told amazon we couldnt do it by the 25th. fedex already turned away volume, who else is gonna do it? amazon isnt gonna turn off their largest selling period of all time. ups said we'll do it by the 27th, take a little heat, amazon will come out smelling like roses. obviously ups doesnt care about image as much as before(unclean trucks and orion). couple days later everyone will forget. now that amazon knows we have their back maybe theyll divert more of the fedex volume to us.
On the 26th, i was taking break and a lady came in and gave me a high five and said this story is a bunch of BS and she still loves us! ive had ALL positive responses

 

[govols019]

All my interactions with customers have been positive as well.

 

[Inthegame]

He adds NOTHING to substantiate the business side of this years christmas failure. He blames Weather?

TOS.

When you capitalized weather and left Christmas small... I quit reading.

 

[worldwide]

There was NOTHING in this article other than SPECULATION from a FORMER executive for DHL, a company in the USA that suffered the largest ground failure in recent memory.

He adds NOTHING to substantiate the business side of this years christmas failure. He blames Weather?

He mentions NOTHING about the cutbacks in staffing, the reduction of trucks on the road both feeder and package. He mentions NOTHING about the excessive hours by package drivers across the country attempting to do more on longer days on the road. He mentions NOTHING about UPS failing to properly forecast volume despite its claims to having the most sophisticated forecasting mechanisms in the industry. He mentions NOTHING about the failure of hiring additional seasonal drivers to ease workloads and properly delivering packages on their schedule delivery days.. He mentions NOTHING about the thousands of "MISSED" packages that were rapant across this country. He mentions NOTHING about IE and its division managers predicting in november that volume would be LIGHTER this year than in previous years and that packages would be SMALLER thereby reducing the need for additional capacity.

Instead, he blames a snowstorm as the ultimate cause of failure.

If you are inclined to want to protect the UPS failure, then this guy is your man. A spokeshole without the FIRST CLUE about the UPS operations at ground level.

Sorry FOLKS, but the burden lays upon Scott Davis and his industrial morons who bought into the "OBAMA ECONOMY" rhetoric and failed to "GET THE BIG PICTURE".

"expect the unexpected", "look outside the box", "leave yourself an out",

Endless rhetoric given to us everyday and yet the very company that needed to depend on this rhetoric failed to GRASP just a single one.

I BLAME the company executives for a massive failure and further, attempting to use spokesholes to blame the customers and shippers.

TOS.

Laying the blame exclusively on UPS shows a clear lack of reality as to the market conditions in the retail industry. How about an industry expert on part of the problem?

Americans are waiting longer and longer to pull the trigger on purchases, said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a Port Washington, New York-based research firm.

“We have watched retailers groom the consumer to wait,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s like rewarding bad behavior. You’re saying to the consumer, ‘the longer you wait, the better the deal, don’t be fooled.’”

“Amazon’s mistake is they are a victim of their own success,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. “They have given us such amazing service for so long that we rely on it and wait to make our orders. Amazon should probably tell people that they have second-day service but they don’t trust the third-party vendors.”

Amazon added one MILLION NEW Prime users the weak before Christmas. UPS had no way to know or anticipate Amazon would do so therefore could not plan for that additional business.

IBM siad this week that holiday shopping produced big year-over-year increases: Thanksgiving, sales up 19.7% year over year; Black Friday, up 19%; and Cyber Monday, up 20.6%. These results were much higher than what the retail industry themselves predicted. Should UPS ignore what the experts in the retail industry say? They have to base their plans on what the experts in the industry are predicting. Good problem to have - more people shopping online than anticipated. The problem is that when unplanned volume gets added to the system at the last minute, it's very challenging to recover. It's not as simple as going down to Budget and Ryder on Dec 21 and getting more vehicles. Most if not all servicable UPS vehicles were on road. Most cargo aircraft are already leased during December so addtional airlift is not available.

Could UPS have done some things differently or better during peak? Of course, there are always areas to improve and they will learn and make adjustments. But to blame only UPS shows you know NOTHING about the retail industry, their customers buying behavior, carrier contracts and their language regarding peak season volume commitment, nor industry trends.