UPS, FedEx in rush for deliveries
947M packages to ship between Black Friday, Christmas
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The humming is constant — a lowpitched drone from 155 miles of conveyor belts racing packages in every direction. Boxes shift from one belt to another and bump into a metal wall. Thud. Thud. Thud. In the background, trucks beep and jet engines roar.
Forget jingling bells and “ho-ho-hos” — these are now the sounds of Christmas.
As more gift-givers shop online, there are more packages to ship. Online sales now account for 10 percent of all shopping and 15 percent during the holidays, according to research firm Forrester. That leaves FedEx and UPS with a combined 947 million packages to deliver between Black Friday and Christmas Eve — up 8 percent from last Christmas season’s forecasts.
For UPS, the key to getting all those last-second orders delivered on time is Worldport, a sorting facility set up between the Louisville airport’s two main runways. On a typical night, 1.6 million packages pass through. Just before Christmas, there can be 4 million, peaking on Monday night.
UPS plans to deliver about 36 million packages today, its busiest day of the year, up from 35 million last year. That includes all of Worldport’s shipments plus those traveling by truck.
Standing next to the runways just after midnight, jet headlights can be seen lined up miles away. Every 60 seconds another plane lands on one of the two parallel runways and pulls up to the facility — the size of 90 football fields — to unload its goods.
If everything goes right, the packages are touched just twice by humans: first when pulled out of large aircraft shipping containers and then again at the end of their journey through the conveyors and into a new bin and another jet.
The past two years have been rough for express shippers.
In 2013, they underestimated the demand for online shopping. Throw in bad weather, and deliveries backed up. Some gifts didn’t arrive in time for Christmas. UPS and
Fedex spent heavily last year to ensure better performance, but still had some major hiccups. Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, J.C. Penney, Kohl’s, Staples and Toys R Us were among the retailers who missed delivery to at least one part of the country, according to industry tracking firm StellaService.
To prevent similar mishaps, UPS and FedEx have been working with major retailers to hone their forecasts and have scheduled extra workers to better meet the shipping spikes right after Thanksgiving
and the weekend before Christmas. Some third-party tracking services have signaled a few issues with 2015 deliveries, but UPS spokesman Mike Mangeot said last week that more than 96 percent of packages are being delivered on time in December and that UPS expects packages to arrive by Christmas.
“In many cases customers are receiving the packages earlier than promised as we are advancing deliveries to make sure the network remains ready for any spikes as lastminute Christmas shipping approaches,” Mangeot said.
Best known for its wooden baseball bats and being home
to the Kentucky Derby, Louisville has relatively good weather and a geography that is perfect for shipping. FedEx has a similar operation in Memphis.
“It’s just an ideal location for us,” said Gary Kelley, manager of the UPS next-day shipping division at Worldport. “We are within two hours [flying time] of 75 percent of the population and within four hours of 95 percent.”
And when you are rushing packages overnight, that proximity to the country’s largest cities matters.
A plane from Seattle might be carrying overnight packages bound for New York, Miami or Chicago. It will stop
in Kentucky. All the boxes and envelopes are unloaded, likely by college students, who make up 70 percent of the employees here.
Next, the packages go onto conveyors where red lasers scan labels and then the system automatically sorts the boxes and directs them to new shipping containers. UPS has 38,000 such containers, and they typically hold about 400 packages. Workers load them back up and then drag the heavy containers across a floor of rollers back onto various planes that head out around the globe.
Up to 416,000 packages can be processed each hour.