I cant speak to what went on in other parts of the country.
What I do know...is that the majority of the service failures that occured in my building could have been prevented simply by empowering our local management to make the decisions that needed to be made.
The week prior to Christmas,every driver in the building was working 13-14 hours per day and being forced to chase misloads and waste time dealing with late air. Then came the morning of Friday the 20th....and we were faced with the heaviest volume our building had ever tried to process combined with every single holder of a DOT card having less than 9 hours of legal driving remaining. The resulting tens of thousands of missed packages were simply rolled over into a Monday dispatch that was even heavier, and we could not cope.
Our local management could have dealt with this by doing 2 things; allowing drivers to roll stops all week to conserve hours for Friday, and running a Sunday sort with 30-40 routes to deliver everything that got missed on Friday. This would have allowed us to go into Monday morning clean and with at least a fighting chance of staying that way thru Christmas Eve. Instead....we got absolutely hammered on Monday, brought even more stops back, and when we had late air come in on Christmas Eve there simply was no one available to shuttle it out to the drivers in a timely manner or in many cases at all. We ran out of DOT hours, we ran out of time and we ran out of bodies because the paranoid, metric-obsessed control freaks from Corporate wouldnt let their front line management make a freaking operational decision.