Call it a Christmas miracle.
Holidays shoppers were warned that supply chain issues stretching all the way to China would result in delayed deliveries and empty shelves.
But the reality was a lot less bleak. According to a report in The New York Times, the Postal Service and UPS delivered about 99% of their packages on time between Nov. 14 and Dec. 11 and FedEx was close behind at 97%.
The outlet adds:
In the two full weeks after Thanksgiving, it took about four days from the moment a package was ordered online for it to be delivered by FedEx, according to data from NielsenIQ, which tracks online transactions from millions of online shoppers in the United States. That compares with about 4.6 days for UPS and more than five days for the Postal Service.
For UPS and FedEx, those figures are an improvement of about 40 percent from a similar post-Thanksgiving period in 2019, according to NielsenIQ. For the Postal Service, it was a 26 percent improvement.
A “shipageddon” was avoided in 2021, in part, because many consumers ordered their holidays gifts weeks in advance or chose to shop at brick and mortar retailers, many of whom offered holiday sales earlier than usual. Delivery companies also hired a glut of workers and expanded their warehouse space.
“The carriers have done their part. Consumers have done their part,” said Satish Jindel, president of ShipMatrix, a software company that services the logistics industry, to the Times. “When they work together, you get good results.”
The avoided shipping disaster was all the more remarkable because holiday spending was up 11.5% from 2020, according to the National Retail Federation.
But the Times warns, “The pandemic is not yet over. Fear over the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus could drive consumers back to online shopping in the months to come, which would impose new pressures on delivery companies and retailers.”
