With more consumers using online and mail order vendors rather than traditional stores, this year sees another record breaking season for shipping companies. The figures so far have shown that consumers have purchased more than $29.3 billion goods online, which is a thirteen percent increase over last year. The increase in sales is in part due to the "free shipping day" where over a thousand online merchants offered holiday deals with no-charge deliveries. This single event in 2011 generated more than a $1 billion in sales. Fedex and UPS have been fighting for shipping business this holiday season. Fedex now offers deliveries in the evening or "by appointment," same day across the city or the country--all for varying fees. FedEx claims that its home delivery and Ground services are faster than UPS Ground. UPS offer a service called "My Choice" that sends multiple digital alerts and updates about when to expect pending deliveries. The service, which currently has 2.1 million subscribers, allows a consumer to reschedule, reroute or waive a required signature.
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I refuse to use UPS there never seem to deliver any of my packages at the time they say and we’ve had to make so many claims due to damaged items.
Seen UPS drivers up and down our road all day since the 15th, but FEDEX never seem to be around.
Why is no-one talking about the USPS, they need all our help. If the USPS goes under we’ll be at the mercy of private shipping companies. That means every remote community can forget about ever receiving mail again. You can be sure the UPS and Fedex will screw every penny they can from the government and it will end up being a shadow of what we currently have with the USPS and it will probably cost the same, if not more.
Here in Europe we use DHL even for shipping packages to the US. It’s a real shame that DHL pulled out of the US.
I agree with the comments about the USPS, we need to support the USPS and make sure we still have a postal service. There are no guarantees that this government will save the postal service.
I don’t like to think of UPS and FEDEX taking over the postal service, but I can see if coming especially if there is the “fiscal cliff” and the government want to remove billions of dollars from the budget. Of course thousands will be unemployed, but that doesn’t seem to bother anyone in Washington.
We use UPS as we can’t get Fedex to come to the office every day, they say we are too remote but UPS don’t have an issue. I don’t understand why Fedex don’t want the business.
Our company got an excellent deal from UPS and we asked FeDex to give us a quote to see of they can match UPS but they didn’t even seem to want to try.
When I lived in Germany the company I worked for used DHL and they were a great company to use, everything was delivered on time and almost zero damages. When I started working for my current company in Chicago they also used DHL and the service was almost as good. However since DHL are no longer in the US, we use UPS and the service is way poorer.
UPS and FedEx have a stranglehold on the package business and USPS will go under in the next year or two. I am not sure if UPS or FedEx would really want to take over the USPS unless the government make it extremely profitable for either company. Of course, the USPS network could be franchised out, regionally like the British government did with their nationalized industries; gas, electricity, railways. BUT the UK did not franchise out the Post Office. Perhaps it is something that cannot be broken up?
UPS have been really bad this year. The first three months of 2012 they were on time, no damages, everything was great, then in April it all started going wrong. In October the logistics manager started to use FedEx and it seems to have made a bit of difference, more of our packages are getting to customers on-time.
Our company has been using UPS and USPS pretty evenly this year, but about two months ago the CIO asked us to try to use USPS as much as possible to help the agency. He issued a memo explaining that we should all support the post office so we don’t lose it.