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As part of a realignment of services, UPS closed its customer service center and distribution warehouse on Hanson Road in Madisonville last week. Although news of any business closing usually comes as a tough blow to any community, in this case, it signifies a major expansion of services and jobs in the Hopkins County area.

When UPS closed the doors to the 20,000-square-feet building it has occupied for decades, it immediately began operating out of a new, state-of-the-art facility on the other side of town. The new 44,000-square-feet structure will allow the company to increase the work flow out of the Madisonville UPS Center, meaning more jobs and more tax dollars coming into the local community.

“I found out about UPS’ plans to relocate outside of Hopkins County the February after I took office,” Madisonville Mayor Kevin Cotton said. “UPS is a fairly large employer, so that was a lot of jobs we stood to lose. I’d been in office just over a month. That isn’t the kind of news that anyone wants to get.”

He said both he and the council went to work right away trying to identify the needs of UPS and to find a way to keep them in the community.

A double drop off brings essentials, gifts and support to deserving families at the Louisville Central Community Center. It’s a special delivery made every year for more than a decade.

Kevin Fields runs the Louisville Central Community Center. The center host’s programs to support single-parent families now and in their futures.

“Our mission is to advance equity through empowerment,” Fields said. “We want to give, give, give until we see the kind of change and economic conditions we know is necessary.”

UPS has helped with nearly 3,000 baskets for families in the Russell neighborhood over the past 11 years. UPS employees personally ensured those baskets were lovingly filled, colleting essentials, food and toys. Mackenzie Wolz works with UPS and dreams of becoming a social worker. She said looking at the baskets of bread, plates, blankets and more reminds her of the reality across the community.

Ground shipments, primarily residential deliveries, have been in focus for United Parcel Service (NYSE:UPS) over the recent quarters. The pandemic resulted in people being confined to their homes and there was a surge in e-commerce activities, bolstering the ground shipments for UPS as well as FedEx, especially in 2020. For perspective, average daily package volume for ground shipments rose 14.5% y-o-y to 17.4 million in 2020. This clubbed with a 4% rise in average revenue per piece for ground shipments meant total ground segment revenues grew 20% over the same period.

However, the situation has changed over the last year or so. The vaccination rate has been on a gradual rise with nearly 60% of the U.S. population currently vaccinated against Covid-19. This has resulted in economies opening up gradually, and people have started to venture out of their homes. This also impacted the ground shipment volume for UPS. The company reported a 2.5% decline in volume in Q3 this year, though the volume remained higher by 2% for the nine month period ending Sep 2021. Despite slowing growth in ground shipment volume, UPS managed to post segment revenue growth of nearly 14% thus far in 2021, driven by better price realization.

Christmas is fast approaching, which means that many Americans have already taken it upon themselves to decorate the outside of their homes.

However, one man’s house was decidedly lacking, so a UPS driver took it upon himself to tell him as much.

In the viral video, which was shared to TikTok by Clayton Martin, we can see the delivery man talking into the doorbell camera as he drops of a package.