Shippers rush to deliver gifts to millions

Associated Press

LOUISVILLE, Ky.

The humming is constant; a low-pitched drone from 155 miles of conveyer belts racing packages in every direction. Boxes shift from one belt to another and bump into a metal wall. Thud. Thud. Thud. In the background, trucks beep and jet engines roar.

Forget jingling bells and ho-ho-hos, these are now the sounds of the holidays.

As more gift-givers shop online, there are more packages to ship. Online sales account for 10 percent of all shopping and 15 percent during the holidays, according to research firm Forrester. That leaves FedEx and UPS with a combined 947 million packages to deliver between Black Friday and Christmas Eve – up 8 percent from last holiday season’s forecasts.

For UPS, the key to getting all those last-second orders delivered on time is Worldport, a massive sorting facility between the Louisville airport’s two main runways. On a typical night, 1.6 million packages pass through. Just before Christmas, there can be 4 million, peaking Monday night.

(UPS plans to deliver about 36 million packages today, its busiest day of the year, up from 35 million last year. That includes all of Worldport’s shipments plus those traveling by truck.)

Standing next to the runways just after midnight, jet headlights can be seen lined up miles away. Every 60 seconds another plane lands on one of the two parallel runways and pulls up to the facility – the size of 90 football fields – to unload its goods.

If everything goes right, the packages are touched just twice by humans: first when pulled out of large aircraft shipping containers and then again at the end of their journey through the conveyors and into a new bin and another jet.

The past two years have been rough for express shippers.

In 2013, they underestimated Americans’ growing fervor for online shopping. Throw in bad weather, and deliveries backed up. Some gifts didn’t arrive in time for Christmas.

UPS and FedEx spent heavily last year to ensure better performance, but still had some major hiccups. Staples, Toys “R” Us, Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, J.C. Penney and Kohl’s were among the retailers who missed delivery to at least one part of the country, according to industry tracking firm StellaService.

To prevent similar mishaps, UPS and FedEx have been working with major retailers to hone their forecasts and have scheduled their extra holiday workers to better meet the shipping spikes right after Thanksgiving and the weekend before Christmas.

Some third-party tracking services have signaled a few issues with 2015 deliveries but UPS spokesman Mike Mangeot said last week that more than 96 percent of packages are being delivered on time in December and that UPS expects packages to arrive by Christmas.