UPS has advised its customers in a note recently posted to their website, that they will push back their “ON-TIME’ Delivery service to certain residential locations to noon from the former 10:30 am delivery commitment. This change will become effective on October 18, 2021, and will remain in effect until further notice.
The note posted on the website indicated the affected residential locations would be those with a “typical delivery time guarantee” of 10:30 am. All service guarantees would be based on the revised delivery commitment times, UPS stated.
Back on April 5, 2021, UPS finally reinstated their Money-Back Guarantees on Next-Day Air delivery services in the U.S. after they suspended them back in late March 2020, using the Covid-19 Pandemic as the reason for suspending the service guarantees. UPS has not yet reinstated their Money-Back Guarantees on all of its products, including its Ground Services and frankly we doubt they will be reinstated until perhaps sometime in 2022, if at all.
UPS, along with all other parcel-delivery companies, is coping with tremendous resource pressures on their networks due to the increased demand for e-commerce orders primarily for residential deliveries. The company was not available for comment on the reasons behind the decision, but simply stated, manpower and capacity issues is obviously the overarching reason.
The continued demand for business-to-consumer (B2C) deliveries is likely to put all surface carriers under tremendous strain during this holiday Peak Shipping Season. It is expected that the volume of packages requiring delivery each day during peak season will exceed total network capacity by 4.7 million. This increased volume however, is expected to be less than 2020’s total of approximately 7 million packages per day. So, are the parcel and surface LTL carriers in a better position to maintain their “on-time” delivery schedules in 2021 than they were in 2020? That is a question that will be answered sooner rather than later.
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