Where are the savings, you ask? If each center eliminates just 1 or 2 air drivers, that's maybe 1500 less package cars that the company needs to purchase, maintain and fuel. 1500 less health plans, retirement fundings, uniforms, DIADs and in some cases a pt or ft sup position can be saved. NDA is down 20-25% from where it used to be. Driver levels down about 10%. Air drivers end up driving the same to and from miles as a ground driver, only to deliver or pickup a few stops. It only makes sense to consolidate the routes. The wage differential is not that great of a difference once you add benefits. The vehicle costs more than make up for it.
You make an excellent point '2yearsAgo' and in theory what you say makes a lot of sense. More sense than I ever hear from UPS.
Problem is, UPS never puts it into practice. I see supervisors driving around in package cars by themselves. Why? What are they doing? They are wasting fuel and putting another package car on the road that doesn't show up in the center numbers.
You can only cut the air route so many times before they realize there is a need for it. It was put in for a reason and that reason becomes quite clear when the route is cut. Yes, you may get away with it for a day here and a day here, but never on a regular basis
There are always packages left behind that must be delivered or shuttled out also. So here is another package car going unnecessarily every day! Shuttled out is the worst because you are wasting 2 drivers time so one of them can deliver one ground package. Now we are talking 10 minutes of time for each driver plus 10-15 minutes of trace-breaking time for the other driver to deliver a ground package.
That's 30 minutes of labor I would never pay if it were my business.
I understand service is important, but if it were my business I would leave the packages to be delivered the following day. Only UPS fanatical managers would pay a driver $29/hour to deliver or shuttle 10 ground packages over a 4 hour period.
I say eat the 10 packages, no? I bet none of the customers will look for a refund on any of those packages. If someone does look for a refund, UPS will most likely stiff them anyway, so what are we loosing here? Just send them the next day in the 'efficiency mobile' any other way would be a cost KILLER!
Why send Joe all over the place to make service on parcels that 99% of our customers don't care about? If the customer really cared, they would have sent it air!
Doesn't make sense to pay someone $100 to obtain $10 in profit. Does it?
Just send them the next day, I would if it were my business....