Shipping mania: cos rushing to deliver millions of holiday gifts

Online sales account for 15% during holidays

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky, Dec 21, (AP): The humming is constant; a low-pitched drone from 155 miles of conveyer 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 the holidays.

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 holiday season’s forecasts.

Massive

For UPS, the key to getting all those last-second orders delivered on time is Worldport, a massive sorting facility located 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 on Tuesday, 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 just touched 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 American’s growing fervor 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. Staples, Toys ‘R Us, Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, J.C. Penney and Kohl’s 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 their extra holiday 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 last-minute Christmas shipping approaches,” says Mangeot.

At first glance, Kentucky doesn’t seem like the epicenter of holiday shipping.

After all, Louisville isn’t the geographic center of the US And this city of 600,000 people is hardly the largest in the country. Best known for its wooden baseball bats and being home to the Kentucky Derby, the city does, however, have relatively good weather and a geography that is perfect for shipping. (FedEx has a similar operation in Memphis, Tennessee.)

“It’s just an ideal location for us,” says 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.” NEW YORK, Dec 21, (AP): More Americans are shunning costly home broadband and using their cellphones to get online, a new survey shows.

Eighty percent of US adults had Internet access this year, whether through a smartphone or a home Internet connection, up from 78 percent two years ago, according to the survey published Monday by the Pew Research Center.

But after years of home broadband growth, slightly fewer adults in 2015 got Internet from providers like home phone or cable company, mostly because it’s too expensive for them. The number dropped to 67 percent from 70 percent in the center’s 2013 survey.

Meanwhile, the number of people relying on cellphones alone for Internet rose to 13 percent this year from 8 percent in 2013.

That plateau in home broadband use comes as the Obama administration has pushed for greater broadband access and criticized the lack of competition among home Internet providers.

The dip in home Internet use could just be temporary, said Pew researcher John Horrigan. Adoption also flatlined five years ago before picking up again, which he said likely had to with economic difficulties in the aftermath of the recession.

For those without home Internet, 33 percent say the biggest reason is the monthly cost is too high, while 10 percent say a computer is too expensive.

But 12 percent say they don’t need it, a smartphone is sufficient.

Of those only getting access through a smartphone, the increase is biggest among low-income Americans. But a smartphone isn’t as easy to use as a home computer when it comes to applying for jobs and is often limited by data caps.

Only 5 percent of people who don’t have home broadband access say that it’s primarily because it’s not available or the speed is too slow, underscoring the growth of broadband networks throughout the US over the past 15 years.

Nearly half of people who don’t have broadband at home have never had it and aren’t interested. That’s partly tied to age: 39 percent are 65 or older.

The Pew report drew on a September 2013 survey of 6,020 US adults and several polls conducted in spring, summer and fall of 2015 that included, in total, 6,687 adults. The margin of error for the home adoption finding was plus or minus 1.3 percentage points in 2015 and 1.4 percentage points in 2013.