Mail carriers have handled the trial crisis well.
“Think about all the mail-in ballots during the election,” Armstrong said. The holiday mailing surge began as early as October and November, and the influx of mail-in ballots (more than 64 million in total) only exacerbated the pressure.
But he noted that “shippers have been handling this pretty well,” including the USPS. More practice.”
Most e-commerce stores encourage early ordering.
“The narrative in the mainstream media and from many brands is…buy early,” Armstrong said.
Abercrombie & Fitch, for example, listed a Dec. 4 holiday shipping deadline in mid-November.
That’s too early! They’ve already extended the deadline to a vague promise — “in the future.” Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
The biggest influx of orders has already happened, so there’s time to get on top of things.
“Typically the two biggest shopping days of the year are Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” Armstrong said.
He noted that the volume of orders received during those days exceeded carrier capacity this year, which does mean delays. But early December won’t see such a big congestion.
“I don’t think this is our most intense period,” Sauceda said, referring to the week of Cyber Monday. “Consumers are anticipating a backlog of orders around [now].”
“Hopefully, carriers will be able to meet demand by the end of December,” Armstrong said.
Why #Shipageddon is really happening
None of this sounds like an asteroid about to collide with Earth, does it? (Quick doomsday recap: An asteroid is about to collide with Earth.) But third-party logistics and transportation companies are also facing some unique uncertainties and obstacles this holiday season.
For one, shoppers always procrastinate. That could mean “a lot of pent-up demand will explode in the last week before carriers shut down,” Sauceda said.
Carriers have certainly built in some buffer for this, he said, but they may still face unusually tight conditions that week. Carriers have the biggest responsibilities for warehousing and shipping, and have imperfect information about their customers’ sales goals and promotions.
This is true for every holiday season, but this year’s is particularly difficult for a few reasons.
It’s hard to predict right now.
Data from past holidays isn’t as useful for forecasting as usual because we’re living through an unprecedented situation — Christmas mixed with a global pandemic.
This is already weird. To spread out shipping volumes, BFCM promotions started as early as October, and Prime Day and other early-bird promotions were introduced. But as we’ve discussed, shopping is heavily skewed online.
Source: Statista
How will these unusual phenomena stack up? It’s hard to say.
Shipping infrastructure lacks flexibility — at least in the short term.
It’s normal for shipping companies to forecast dips and troughs in demand — but if orders this month come in far above forecast, “I can’t hire people fast enough to fix that,” Sauceda said.
That means delays.
Even hiring can only solve problems up to a certain size. If orders exceed forecasts by a few dozen percentage points, Sauceda said, staffing is needed. But if orders exceed forecasts by a few hundred percentage points, Sauceda said, that could require additional warehouse space to sort packages.
(Right now, more additional warehouse space than usual is needed numeros de telefono brasil because of social distancing rules.)
Adding floor space is a big, slow undertaking. “It takes a couple of weeks to lease a hundred thousand square feet of building space,” Sauceda said.
There’s a shortage of delivery vehicles.
Carriers need trucks, cars and vans to make the last mile of deliveries, and they’re all competing against each other. With so much competition, carriers may ask employees to deliver packages in their own vehicles, following Amazon’s lead.
The delivery giant launched Amazon Flex, an Uber-like program designed to outsource delivery work to gig workers, back in 2015 — but even as the program expanded the tech giant's delivery capabilities, it also brought problems. Unmarked vehicles and plainclothes couriers can be intimidating to customers and create safety issues for delivery drivers.
At least that's the case in Ice T's household.