Everyone in the retail sector is bracing themselves for a record-setting holiday shopping season. But they’re not the only ones. As the holiday shopping season looms around the corner, international parcel shippers FedEx and UPS expect to see another record year for holiday package handling.
Fueled in part by an estimated 18 percent jump over 2015 in online holiday spending, the shipping giants expect Mondays to be the biggest days for shipping of them all. Experts expect eCommerce will end up accounting for a projected 10+ percent of all holiday commerce in 2016, the highest ratio in history.
FedEx expects every Monday from Nov. 28 through Dec. 19 of this year to be the busiest in the company’s history — a series of Black Fridays for shipping, in a sense.
Patrick Fitzgerald, senior vice president of integrated marketing and communications for FedEx, was quoted as saying: “We won’t have a busiest day this year, because we will have busiest days. That could be anywhere from the Monday before Christmas to Cyber Monday following Thanksgiving.”
Both FedEx and UPS will hire additional temporary employees to handle the parcel influx — 50,000 and 95,000 temporary workers, respectively. UPS reportedly expects to handle 700 million parcels this year, a jump of 17 percent from 2015. FedEx expects an estimated 358 million packages, a 10 percent increase in packages from its record of 325 million in 2015.
Both shipping giants are hoping to be well-prepared this year to avoid repeating major holiday parcel delay debacles in the days leading up to Christmas Eve in previous years. Packages were delayed by days, even weeks, due to higher-than-expected volumes of shipping requests.
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