The economy is not in the ditch and all the shipping companies are operating at daily levels now that were considered peak volumes 15 months ago. Ecommerce is up significantly in the last few weeks because of tax season and government stimulus checks hitting accounts. It's spring, so retail stores are getting in their spring and summer inventory which increases volume in the networks too. The military's spending is always strong, so all the affiliated industries still have plenty of volume coming and going as well. Then there's the weather delays (it's still winter you know) throughout the country. Just because it's sunny where you are, doesn't mean it's that way everywhere. Hubs are only capable of processing a certain volume of packages. It's not about staffing, it's about the way the entire system is engineered. You can't just crank the speed up on the conveyor belts to process the freight faster. If a hub can sort 300K packages a day at max capacity but 310K are presented, 10K packages will have to be staged, there's no way around it.
Unemployment is high because a high percentage of the population is either unqualified to do the job, or simply unemployable. Do you have any idea how many people can't pass a simple drug test? How about watching some of these folks drive? Just because some yokel can get a CDL and drove a truck around for a while, doesn't mean he's capable of the technical driving required in a package van like a UPS or FedEx truck. Try running a criminal background check and you lose 10-15% of the applicants right off the bat. Now tell try telling the remaining applicants that they're actually going to have to do physical labor AND have good customer service skills; you just lost another 50% of the remaining applicants. Once you get the rare applicant who meets all the requirements and sticks around for a couple months, how long do you think they'll keep a good attitude when customers accuse them of stealing their packages or think it's acceptable to berate a driver for something that's out of the driver's control? The fact that anyone even thinks of getting into the delivery industry surprises me sometimes.
The most common suggestion is to just pay everyone in the industry more because that would help with hiring and retention. In order to do that though, shipping costs would have to go up. Then customers would have a fit because they're paying more and don't see an immediate improvement in service.
There's a lot more to the whole delivery industry than most people are aware of. I think the fact that just about any of the major carriers can move a package from coast to coast in less than 5 days with the level of accuracy that they do is pretty spectacular.
