What are the carriers doing to prepare for the holiday season?

In the past few weeks, both FedEx and UPS have announced their 2023 surge pricing, which will cover the peak holiday season, as well as their 2024 rate increases. On September 26, UPS reported its plans to hire 100,000 seasonal workers ahead of the holiday rush. The number of full- and part-time seasonal employees is similar to the number employed last year at this time, showing that UPS expects this season to follow a similar course to the 2022 holiday season.

On the other hand, the United States Postal Service is cutting its peak holiday surcharge, with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy saying, “we’ve made a lot of operational improvements that eliminated some of the extra activities that we had when I first got here.” With this operational betterment and “no holiday surcharges, we are strongly positioned to be America’s most affordable delivery provider this holiday season.”

Among the improvements is USPS’s plan to consolidate sortation and delivery terminals into fewer facilities. Like all carriers, the USPS is seeing lower numbers of packages, making this an ideal time for them to automate fulfillment processes in a central location.

What does that mean for you as a customer?

Consolidation may be good for the carrier’s bottom line, but it’s not necessarily a benefit for you. Fewer fulfillment centers mean packages have further to go before reaching their final destinations, increasing fuel costs, which will inevitably be passed along to the customer. With further to travel, parcels are even more likely to be impacted by inclement weather and other unexpected delays.

While UPS has yet to announce its plan for this year, in 2022, the carrier honored its money-back guarantee on all Next-Day air and Worldwide Express shipments throughout the holidays. Unlike its top competitor, FedEx pulled all of its money-back guarantees during peak season, reinstating them on January 3.

If money-back guarantees are honored this year, automatic parcel audits can help you recover funds when the carriers fail to uphold their service guarantees.

Even without money-back guarantees, there are ways to lower your shipping expenditures— even during peak season. The team at ShipRx knows industry standard rates and has more than 30 years of negotiation experience, frequently resulting in a 20-30% reduction in shipping costs for our clients.

Contact ShipRx for a free savings analysis, where we’ll tell you how easy it is to recover refunds with a parcel audit and assess your current parcel rate contract to discover how you can save on every shipment. As we move into the holiday season, the greatest gift you can give yourself is the gift of savings!

Todd Partner