In a recent article published by Freightways, the Peak Season Holiday Delivery Season wasn’t’ perfect, but it also wasn’t the “Shipageddon” many had feared either.
According to the article, much of the “success” was due to the service performance of the major parcel carriers. UPS delivered 96.7% of its parcels on time during a five-week cycle tracked by consultancy ShipMatrix and FedEx delivered 95.1% of their packages on time, while the U.S. Postal Service, beset by understaffing and an avalanche of parcels from FedEx and UPS shippers whose volumes exceeded those carriers’ ceilings, came in at 93.2%, the consultancy said.
What’s really interesting is that both FedEx and UPS posted better on-time performances than they did during the 2019 peak shipping season, and the Postal Service’s year-over-year performance was down by just 0.7%, ShipMatrix said.
In fact, during the critical Christmas week period, which ran from Dec. 20 to 26, UPS posted on-time delivery performance of 97.6%, FedEx came in at 96.5% and the Postal Service at 94.7%. Satish Jindel, ShipMatrix’s president, said the carriers’ Christmas week performance was better than it was during the prior week. Still, the huge spikes in volume resulted in more than 2 million parcels not delivered by Christmas, even with the carriers making deliveries on Christmas Day, Jindel said.
The 2020 peak was the busiest on record as more than 3 billion parcels were delivered, according to ShipMatrix data. E-commerce fulfillment and delivery activity has been elevated since March as the COVID-19 pandemic kept consumers out of the stores and on their mobile devices. The online order flow reached a crescendo during the holidays as another surge of the coronavirus collided with the always-busy seasonal cycle.
So, with these Peak Season on time delivery results, (again better than the parcel carriers performance during the Peak 2019 shipping season), why haven’t UPS and FedEx reinstated their Guaranteed Service Refund Programs? We think it’s about time they do so. What are your thoughts?
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