I wonder if this will affect the availability of UPS through Amazon Buy Shipping or even Veeqo, if not right away but perhaps eventually.
UPS shares tank 15% after weak guidance, plan to slash Amazon deliveries by more than half
I wonder if this will affect the availability of UPS through Amazon Buy Shipping or even Veeqo, if not right away but perhaps eventually.
UPS shares tank 15% after weak guidance, plan to slash Amazon deliveries by more than half
I wonder how it will affect USPS for 3p sellers. Their last holiday season performance was not the best.
I would not feed the mouth that plans to eat me either. I don’t know why UPS did not throttle Amazon a decade ago when FedEx gave Amazon the middle finger.
Apparently someone on the board at UPS was like "Oh wait… when they say “partner” they actually mean “our bitc h”.
Perhaps UPS will make better flat rate services and logistics to allow small business’ to actually compete. My last quote from UPS was nearly double the logistics cost of FBA with all the fees, so they better pull their head out of their A.
With USPS rates increasing twice yearly now, it seems to me that a competitor could offer rates at or very near USPS for some services and steal quite a bit of business. FedEx One Rate for small packages is coming pretty close, for example, as is its Ground Economy rate.
Honestly though, what scares me the most about UPS is their shockingly high adjustments that are nearly impossible to fight if the label was bought through Amazon. So many horror stories about UPS mistakes in this regard that I would not even consider buying a UPS label.
This article is based on a statement by UPS with the best possible spin they could muster.
Clearly, UPS was taken by surprise by Amazon’s further cuts in their business. It is hard to believe they would have come to the same deal with the Teamsters if they anticipated these cuts.
FEDEX has never recovered from the loss of Amazon business. It is attempting to leverage its independent contractor delivery cost advantage to become a low priced carrier, but the quality of their service sucks in most of the country. I will not buy from businesses who ship to me via FEDEX ground.
UPS has high priced union workers. Amazon has “independent contractors” some of who probably don’t even get benefits. It’s very hard to compete with that.
Yes the service level of UPS is better, but if you’re shipping stuff that’s relatively inexpensive/not fragile, the dummies working for Amazon probably do a sufficient enough job where the freight savings more than pay for lost/damaged stuff.
Wonder what this does for SPD to FBA?
Perhaps the smile vans will be picking up or there will be some other Amazon truck patrolling for FBA inventory from sellers.
I was just wondering about that. I assume this will be bad news to us FBA sellers, unless Amazon shipping has the same reliability as UPS if they take over SPD shipments to Amazon FCs.
It’s not that hard. This is why places like Costco can compete with Wal-Mart despite union labor. The gains of competent employees usually excel over the long run with the ONLY exception being cheap trinkets, but as you get into almost anything requiring more experience than “welcome too…” or “may I see your receipt”, the curve becomes more steep.
I imagine it will be the same as most inbound UPS FC shipments are FTL deliveries and the reference, in my assumption, is that UPS will cut back on Amazon deliveries to consumers as they are the most expensive for UPS to operate. FTL/LTL parcel shipments to FC’s are a fraction of the manpower.
I imagine rural Amazon customers are going to get screwed because Amzaon does not have the delivery reach outside of most metro areas.
Maybe not … there are some rural post offices in our area that are getting one to two Amazon trucks full of packages for delivery which puts the burden on USPS to handle. The end result is that USPS is having a little issue with keeping those particular post offices staffed as no one wants to work in a post office that gets these types of Amazon drops. If USPS can adapt to this type of pressure in these smaller post offices, then UPS isn’t needed in the rural areas.
With that said, we still see UPS trucks daily in our little rural town along with Amazon delivery “cars”. The one we do not see a lot of is FedEx (except during the holiday time).
Well, there is rural…
Then there is RURAL…
And then there is Wyoming where being on a USPS rural route means you get your mail once a week unless you just happen to go to town or maybe next week or two if there happens to be a snow storm …
Costco has the membership fees which make a huge difference. It is true that over 90% of its members renew so I am not going to deny that buyer loyalty is a factor but their markups are lower than Walmart’s and their buyers are more effective than Walmart’s because they are buying a smaller number of products.
Their buyers are also more capable of making price vs features decisions than other retailers. In electronics they often have Costco only models, with the enhanced Costco warrantees throught the manufacturers. Sometimes with extra features, sometimes with fewer features but a lower price.
Although I think a lot of Costco employees, I have found their big city stores to be inferior to their other stores in terms of customer service. Some of their stores are zoos. Fortunately, I only shop in those stores when I am away from home.
My assertion was that almost any Costco employee is more capable and competent due to lack of turnover than the overwhelming majority of Wal-Mart staff. This data is proven time and time again in the book, with only a handful of specific caveats for specific business models. Churning through cheap labor only gets you so far, and then you run out of village idiots to hire, something Amazon has recently been dealing with when they fire a percentage of the community who will not work like slaves to a palm pilot.
If I were UPS I would be more worried about drone delivery from 3rd party carriers in the next decade.
Geography plays a big role in turnover.
Been seeing some of the same cashiers at Walmart stores for close to 10 years.
The local supermarket chain has employee badges with their length of service. Some of the cashiers have worked for the stores for 20 years or more.
What appears to be a crappy job to someone who does not need a job at that level can be a treasure to someone who cannot find a better job.
IMO Amazon needs to turn over more of its employees than whatever numbers it chooses to. The corporate culture is toxic. This is not a current management problem. This goes back to the early days of Bezos.
The corporate culture at Costco is not toxic, but it may not have scaled adequately and may not suit some areas of the country. I would be more interested in a range of turnover rates in Costco warehouses than the aggregate rate of turnover.
I suppose I should disclose that I am a Costco shareholder. And that I was pleased the stock hit another all time high today.
No, I do not own Amazon or UPS stock and am unlikely to buy either. But I also do not hold any Nvidia.
UPS CEO Carol Tome said on a call with investors that Amazon is UPS’ largest customer, but it is not the company’s most profitable customer. “Its margin is very dilutive to the U.S. domestic business,” she added.
I think this distinction between volume and profitability is important.