Shipping mania: rushing to deliver millions of holiday gifts

Dixon tells Channel 2 Action News he was beyond thankful, and so grateful that someone went out of their way to show just how much they appreciated how hard UPS works to get packages to customers on time.

Early Tuesday, workers at the 120,000-square-foot Prairie Avenue facility were busy sorting packages and loading them into trucks lined up along a slow moving conveyor belt.

UPS (NYSE:UPS) and its long-time shipping customer Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) are drifting apart, as Amazon tries out its own delivery methods and turns to other services to cut escalating delivery costs. That would be a record amount for the shipping company.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) – About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations of power plants across the USA, according to top experts who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Fortune said the growth in package delivery has increased with online e-commerce growth.

FedEx and UPS are expected to deliver a combined 947 million packages between Black Friday and Christmas Eve – up 8 percent from last holiday season’s forecasts. In most cases, it’s also true that delivery companies have the ability to push a delivery time back, while still retaining their on-time status.

As online shopping continues to grow in popularity, it will become increasingly important for warehouses to be as efficient as possible.

UPS expects to deliver 36 million packages today alone, and projects that in the Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s window, it will deliver more than 630 million packages, a 10 percent increase over last year.

Adobe predicts that online sales in November and December will total $83 billion, an increase of 11% compared with a year earlier.

If a delivery driver for FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service or UPS pulls up in front of your home in a U-Haul, Budget, Penske or another rental truck, there’s likely no need to call the police. Retailers too, are to blame, with their promises that down-to-the-wire orders will reach buyers before the 25th.

It’s all about getting packages to where they’re going – fast. But plenty of property managers, anxious about the expansion of online shopping more generally, are making permanent changes.

Last-minute shoppers may still be able to have a package delivered by Christmas Eve, but there’s a price for convenience.

Jim Hayes, a meteorologist with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said the weather is expected to cooperate for the most part with deliveries, saying there will not be “much in the way of winter weather” to delay packages outside the U.S. mountain region. Just today, they are expecting to deliver 30 million packages and they’ve been preparing all year.