When United Parcel Service — UPS — started, it was pretty simple: Take stuff from one place in Seattle to another place in Seattle, safely and punctually. It was well over 100 years ago — 1907, actually — that two teenagers set up shop as American Messenger Company. They weren’t the first, but they were competitive. It was renamed Merchants Parcel Delivery around the time they added motor vehicles — motorcycles, and a Ford Model T, according to the company’s history site. Vehicles meant deliveries could be consolidated. Business was good — very good — and with more business came expansion — first, to Oakland, California — and then a new name: United Parcel Service, in 1919. “Service,” said Charlie Soderstrom, one of the company founders, “is all we have to offer.” That, and a fleet of brown trucks, which was his idea, too; brown gave them a “stately appearance.”
You know those big brown trucks that are keeping us well-delivered during this time of COVID-19? Well, there’s some interesting history and tech to United Parcel Service, or UPS.
Founded as the American Messenger Company in Seattle in 1907, most deliveries back then were to stores, not customers, and done on foot or by bicycle. Adding a Model T to their fleet in 1913, the company started serving neighborhoods. By 1930 the company expanded to most cities in the East and Midwest, adding delivery by airline cargo partnerships to their modes of transportation.
About 40 Ames community members gathered on a rainy Thursday morning to celebrate Ames UPS drivers for reaching 1 million miles without any accidents.
Members of the Ames community were invited by the UPS Safety Committee to send off their drivers by lining the street with cars and celebrating the “accomplishment and the hard work the drivers are doing day in and day out for the community for which they live and work in,” Anthony Brice, UPS Safety Committee chair said.
Among the crowd, signs reading “We love UPS” and “You are the best” were raised as 35 UPS drivers headed out to start their deliveries.
UPS typically imposes extra fees on merchants during the busy Christmas shopping season
United Parcel Service Inc. is adding “peak” surcharges for companies that have been inundating its delivery network with too many packages and oversize items during the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented move to manage a summer flood of shipments and higher costs.
UPS typically imposes extra fees on merchants during the busy Christmas shopping season, but — for the first time in the e-commerce era — will add such surcharges starting May 31. The fees would apply to large online sellers like Amazon.com Inc. as well as traditional retailers like Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. that have shifted heavily to e-commerce as many stores have closed temporarily.
Air hub is responsible for making Louisville the fourth-largest cargo airport in the world
UPS Airlines is expanding in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic that is forcing passenger airlines to shrink fleets and permanently downsize in line with expectations for weak travel demand in the coming years.
The UPS fleet has been busy flying charter flights for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other customers ordering desperately needed medical supplies for the COVID-19 response in the U.S. and other countries. But the real driver of extra business and aircraft investment is e-commerce and customers seeking express shipping – factors that were rising in importance well before the pandemic.