Rush To Deliver Millions Of Gifts On Time
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MIAMI (CBSMiami) - If you waited until now to ship or mail your gifts to family members and friends, you're not alone.
The United States Postal Service said Monday is their busiest day of the year with more than 30 million packages expected to be delivered. The deadline is Wednesday for postal customers who want their packages delivered by Christmas if they use Priority Mail Express.
The postal service isn't the only delivery service that's in overdrive. 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.
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. FedEx has a similar operation in Memphis, Tennessee.
On a typical night, 1.6 million packages pass through Worldport. 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.
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