BrownCafe
Some of us just got around to ordering our presents. You mind maybe holding off on the white stuff for a couple of days until they get where they are going?
Maybe we’re fretting needlessly about the holiday gifts. The folks who deliver the goodies say they have it under control.
United Parcel Service has a team of five meteorologists keeping up with the latest weather. If there is a storm that might affect deliveries, the weather people talk with UPS’s contingency team and reroute packages.
Online retail sales are expected to reach $392.5 billion this year, according to research firm eMarketer, but with U.S. consumers now demanding free shipping on most packages, shippers and retailers are facing a squeeze.
Shippers’ margins are falling or stagnating, despite steady price increases, because homes are roughly three times as expensive to deliver to as business addresses. And retailers cannot pass along the cost, because they must offer free shipping in order to compete.
The shared solution: design new, space-saving packages that can help improve package density on delivery trucks. This cuts costs for retailers and raises margins for shippers.
“UPS uses golf carts for deliveries where it makes the most sense — typically in some fast-growth residential communities,” said Jennifer Cook, a spokeswoman with UPS. “The environmental and economic benefits are obvious: reduced noise and fuel conservation and in many cases, earlier residential deliveries.”
In the age of Amazon, drones and one-hour delivery, the move to use golf carts is a “pretty progressive” for UPS, says retail analyst Jeff Green.
“It’s very smart. It’s got to be more cost-effective and a way to deliver packages faster through a more targeted geography,” Green said.
A FedEx truck driver was carjacked on Detroit’s west side as he tried to deliver hundreds of packages ahead of the holidays.
Police say the 37-year-old driver was parked at the located when a masked suspect entered his truck, flashed a gun and ordered the driver out of the truck. The bandit then took off in the vehicle, which was carrying over 200 packages. The driver was uninjured.
With wage and hour lawsuits becoming increasingly common across the country, there was little reason for the lawyers at Amazon.com’s Seattle headquarters to be surprised when one landed on their doorstep recently. But they may have been concerned to learn that their newest legal adversary is “Sledgehammer Shannon” Liss-Riordan, a Boston attorney who gained legal fame by beating corporate giants like FedEx and Starbucks in just these kinds of contests.
The new lawsuit against Amazon is similar to one of Liss-Riordan’s best known cases—a suit against FedEx that charged the company was misclassifying delivery drivers as independent contractors when the workers were, as a matter of law, regular employees. Liss-Riordan won that fight and, this year, FedEx announced that it would give up on a series of related legal fights and pay $240 million to some 12,000 drivers in 20 states.