The thing I find curious about UPS/Fedex operations is that they're still oriented around a "make deliveries during business hours" model that made sense decades ago when businesses were overnighting documents to each other, but makes less sense when traffic is largely goods ordered online and shipped to residences. To an outsider, it seems like door tags/missed deliveries/redeliveries must be inefficient, expensive, and almost entirely predictable for the carrier, while also being a major driver of customer pain.
While I agree with you about the inconvenience of most residential shipping services, I think people not interacting directly with the industry tend to forget how absolutely huge the business-to-business market still is for UPS. I expect the margins are quite a bit larger for them there as well.
Working in the engineering field, people send things at shipping prices of $50-$200 plus per package on the daily. The only thing that matters is that it arrives where it's needed fast. I can't say for sure, but I would expect that UPS is still more inclined to cater to the relatively price insensitive business customer over the Amazon Prime residential customer.
Not surprised. Amazon has their "free shipping" program which puts enormous downward pressure on shipping pricing all the way back to the carriers.
Non-Amazon traffic, for example, business to business traffic, might not be growing as fast, but Fedex/UPS can charge $50+ or even $200+ for a single shipment - that's more than probably the average lifetime shipping profit made from a single Amazon prime user - in one single business-to-business shipment!
A regular North American business would probably have anywhere from 10 to 100 packages a day sent out via courier/UPS/Fedex.
No problem seeing where the profits come from.
Volume does not mean profit, especially when the volume is trying to push for eliminating UPS and FedEx's profits (via offering free shipping)
It's common to be able to choose the day and the delivery time. 8am-12pm, 2pm-4pm, 4pm-6pm, 6pm-8pm, 7pm-9pm and I've never had them be 1 minute outside their designated schedule.
And, prices are cheap. Price to send a large package from Tokyo to Osaka (think SF to LA) (larger than the USPS would even allow), $20
Economic and political differences probably have a lot to do with the price difference, but another factor is size. Based on the overall difference in geographical size, I would absolutely expect higher shipping costs in the US. That SF to LA shopping cost likely subsidizes the cost of shipping from LA to Orlando (far and moderately expensive) and even the cost of shipping LA to rural Wyoming (closer but possibly even more expensive).
As a country grows in area, a graph between all points within would increase exponentially. So I'd posit that, similar to the square cube law, shipping costs would grow exponentially with increases in geographical area.
How is this accomplished? Is it because of Tokyo's railway system?
Another example of cheap and fast delivery is in New Zealand, which is very roughly similar in size as Japan (and an island!) But infrastructure there is much, much, simpler.
Between the DCs they use 18 wheelers; they’re then taken on a smaller truck to a local site and take to the end user by a truck or handcart.
It’s partially because of different relative distribution of supply and demand and partially because infrastructural technology is just better here. (Random customer visible example: high-end apartments in Tokyo generally have an on-site package locker so that companies can drop off packages even when the recipient isn’t home, which is a major convenience and avoids unnecessary redeliveries.)
I was just staying in a place in the US that had a package room with per-parcel codes for access.
It was kind of a terrible experience. Just because you had the address and unit number on there, you needed to be "in the system" so they could email/txt you an access code. I had a box of flowers for Mother's day that didn't show up until a week later. When everything did work as expected, it was still very problematic. Any "delivery" alerts were meaningless because it may not have been registered to the package room yet. The package room was a mess and was often difficult to find your packages--then you had to carry them all back to your unit. I'm not sure if they bundled access codes (i.e. 5 packages arrive but they only register the first and give you one code), but this seemed to happen to me. If you did forget a package they expired unused codes after you access. So if you forgot or couldn't carry everything you can no longer access the room.
I'm sure this simplifies things for the carrier, but I wouldn't be surprised if missing packages increased sharply when these were introduced. I also got the feeling packages were delivered to the front office before this system was in place (which would be the same, or perhaps, less work for the carriers). Which negates a lot of the issues mentioned above, but does mean you can only pick up your packages during office hours.
I haven't experienced Japanese package delivery, but when I first heard about it a few years ago I got super envious.
This sounds like a terribly implemented package room, not a significant problem with the concept.
One system I saw recently had a touch screen where the carrier selects the address and individual they are delivering to, and then that individual is notified. They could use their permanent password, door id fob, or a one time access code for each parcel. As for not being able to get it upstairs; there was nothing stopping you relocking parcel.
The system in place was obvious they didn't want to give all tenants unrestricted access to the room. Each time you entered a code you had to sign for your package and it took a photo. The room was also video monitored. Who knows if it was bad design, appreciable increase in theft, or insurance reasons.
I still think the worst part of the experience was sifting through all the packages. They had a shelf dedicated for each floor, but a sign saying people move stuff. I saw the office staff go in and resort packages onto the correct shelf everyday.
I've had much, much better experiences with Amazon locker. If I was still in an apartment and one was 0.5 - 1 mile away I would choose it every time (assuming it was a 24hr location).
As a point of comparison, Japan has less landmass than California and more than 3x as many people. For something like package delivery, where a huge amount of the cost is in the “last mile”, increased population density will drive down costs and allow for improved service levels.
Population density helps with making deliveries more efficient, at least in urban areas. Just down the street from me there is a mini delivery center (just the 1st floor office in a regular building) where packages are sent before they are pushed out in carts to buildings in the surrounding area. The last mile is really easy when everyone lives on top of each other.
That said, it's not all perfection. Recently one of the large delivery companies had problems fulfilling all its evening delivery slots and the number of re-deliveries weren't helping. I think every building should have lockable delivery boxes at the front door as standard, then almost all packages can be left without customer interaction.
>> While I agree with you about the inconvenience of most residential shipping services, I think people not interacting directly with the industry tend to forget how absolutely huge the business-to-business market still is for UPS. I expect the margins are quite a bit larger for them there as well.
Definitely. The consumer side is less relevant compared to the business side.
We spend tons of money on UPS' insurance products that they must kill us on, but we have no choice, as we send $10k+ packages regularly. USPS' insurance is a complete joke but UPS/FedEx honor theirs pretty regularly, even if there are some hoops to jump.
as a consumer, i can’t stand the insurance policies of shipping companies. you pay them to ship something, and then you have to pay them more to make sure they actually ship it properly. it’s insane to me. and UPS has gotten exceedingly picky. you cannot insure anything unless you let them pack it. i once tried to insure shipping a synth that i put back into the manufacturer’s own original box with the original packing material. this was then going to be out into a UPS box. the guy wouldn’t insure it because they didn’t pack it. he explained they would have to ship the synth in their own packing and then ship the box separately in the same box. that is just one insane example, but now, it can cost like $70-100 just to ship a normal sized, insured package with them.
one time with the USPS, the mail person folded a large hardcover book in half like a taco to fit it into a PO box. when i called the local post office to complain to a manager, she explained that the shipper didn’t purchase insurance and so they couldn’t do anything. when i explained that was for accidents and not intentional destruction of packages she basically yelled at me and that was that. no follow up, no nothing.
these shipping companies hide behind these insurance policies because they basically can do whatever they want with your package and it’s the only little power you have. and it’s obviously something they make a lot of money off of.
>as a consumer, i can’t stand the insurance policies of shipping companies. you pay them to ship something, and then you have to pay them more to make sure they actually ship it properly. it’s insane to me. and UPS has gotten exceedingly picky. you cannot insure anything unless you let them pack it. i once tried to insure shipping a synth that i put back into the manufacturer’s own original box with the original packing material. this was then going to be out into a UPS box. the guy wouldn’t insure it because they didn’t pack it. he explained they would have to ship the synth in their own packing and then ship the box separately in the same box. that is just one insane example, but now, it can cost like $70-100 just to ship a normal sized, insured package with them.
I think you're running into the policies of your local, privately-owned UPS store. I insure stuff with UPS regularly, with zero interaction with UPS staff. I login to the website, print the label and go. There's no UPS person approving or rejecting my insurance request.
this has been my experience when shipping musical equipment that i have sold on eBay and such at multiple UPS stores in two different states. although, i have not done it through the online system. it’s going to be pretty frustrating if it’s differently enforced there. and also confusing.
have you ever had to get an insurance payment on a damaged shipment? when shipping this musical equipment, damage can be catastrophic if the insurance coverage is rejected after the fact once a UPS person comes into the picture.
You need to ask for the postmaster general and if that doesn't work escalate up the chain. I've had a few issues with my mail delivery and after one call it was sorted.
Had a problem at a previous apartment with people breaking into the physical mailbox and stealing credit cards, then activating and using them for a day before I caught it. Happened a few times to my and a few times to another resident that I talked to about it. Apartment complex is huge (~35 buildings with ~30 units per building) and owned by an even bigger company with dozens of properties around the country. Got the actual mail fraud investigator people to come out and yell at the apartment management about having an improperly-secured mailbox after my talking to them had no effect. The mailboxes were wall-mount indoor units where one big swing-open panel gave access to ~40 mailboxes; the locking mechanism was just a padlock and a slider bar. The slider bar was mounted to drywall with drywall anchors, so to break in, they used a claw hammer or crowbar to just rip the locking mechanism out of the wall, left the door open, threw ripped-open mail everywhere... the apartment maintenance people just filled the holes with drywall filler, then put the drywall anchors back into that. You could pull it out with your fingers, and it looks like that was exactly what happened on subsequent thefts.
Anyway, the apartment management people basically told the USPS inspectors “new mailboxes cost money” and that was that. I moved out a few months later and mentioned that this incident was partially the cause. USPS recommended that I use a post office box to ensure that my mail wouldn’t get stolen, which I understand, but at the same time is pretty ridiculous IMO.
TL;DR USPS was very responsive and sympathetic to my situation, but ultimately couldn’t actually make my huge apartment company secure their mailboxes.
USPS is government-run (please, spare me the "it's a private business" and everyone else that's about to chime in with "well actually") so what do you expect when it comes to customer service? They're the cheapest option in general and deliver faster than UPS/FedEx using Priority Mail (though their Express Mail product sucks compared to the courier services of UPS/FedEx), so people are going to go with them due to Ebay sellers and everyone else abusing flat rate packaging.
Getting USPS to care is impossible. I actually got a reply from Jeff Bezos in addition to a "?" email because Amazon was using USPS on Sundays for delivery, but USPS is unreachable on Sundays and Amazon has no way of contacting them either, so when USPS deliverymen refuse to deliver packages to my very obviously open business on Sunday citing that we weren't there (bullshit), there's nothing I can do. I wrote it up, sent it to Jeff, and they blacklisted USPS for my route on Sundays and now use Amazon drivers.
Unfortunately, if you go through USPS, they don't care. Much like any other government service you use.
I posted my account above, but in my case, USPS cared very much, but was ultimately unable to get my awful apartment company to install more secure mailboxes since they kept getting broken into.
Please don’t derail the thread with political rants. In addition to being off-topic it’s based on logical errors, such as assuming your limited personal experience is globally true (for me, s/USPS/UPS/) or that quality is an inherent trait of the concept and constant (this is why Comcast is not usually cited as proof that capitalism cannot work).
It's not a political rant to point out that the USPS operates on a different (and often insensible) plane because it is a government bureau. The poster's comment isn't off topic. Although her/his post is merely anecdotal and not statistically significant, it may ring familiar to others' encounters with that organization. Your post is more of an interruption here than is hers/his. Consider my post as a vector of your derailment.
> It's not a political rant to point out that the USPS operates on a different (and often insensible) plane because it is a government bureau.
Sure it is, that's an inherently political argument to make.
My counterpoint: I ordered a few things from a vendor (Waytek) recently. Waytek ships via UPS exclusively. I chose UPS Ground service which would've gotten the package to me in about a week. UPS got the package to California, to the regional sorting center in California, sent me an email telling me to expect a delivery, and then got the package to Massachusetts that same evening. UPS said they'll deliver the package in another week or so (assuming they don't bounce it back to the east coast). Despite being able to ship it on their dime cross-country in less than a day, they've put the package on the slow boat back to its intended destination. The UPS response has been: keep an eye on the tracking number and take it up with the vendor if you have any issues. Waytek's stance is that it's officially my property and their duty ended when they dropped the package off with THEIR shipping vendor (UPS).
Tell me again how private corporations are inherently more accountable?
Oh, and how about the time UPS accepted a package from a vendor with multiple shipping labels on it. They got the package to the local distribution center (different than my previous post) and kept rescheduling delivery without ever putting it on a truck, contacting myself, or the vendor.
Meanwhile I've ordered replacement parts for the Waytek order from a vendor that ships USPS. The tracking information is showing an estimated delivery date of two days from now (Tuesday), but they're also showing that the package has left the local regional distribution center. That gives me about a 95% chance of having the package in my box 10 AM tomorrow morning (one day early).
> It's not a political rant to point out that the USPS operates on a different (and often insensible) plane because it is a government bureau.
There are two reasons why I called it a rant. The first was begging the question of whether that’s true, as you also made the mistake of doing, since there was no attempt to introduce data or analysis showing that the USPS is substantially worse. Since Amazon famously does that kind of analysis, cares a lot about customer satisfaction, and uses a number of carriers it seems especially unlikely that there’s some huge problem they haven’t noticed.
The second reason, however, is the error of treating the quality of government as constant and inalterable. That’s effectively arguing that there’s no difference between South Sudan and Norway, and it’s what really made me regret wasting space on a lazy rant. Even if it was true, the grownup discussion would be how we should have better management and incentives rather than assuming it can never work, just as reasonable people react to a bad experience with a company by supporting boycotts, regulation, or legal improvements rather than saying the private business model can never work.
There was actually a panel discussion on Friday about modernizing the USPS with many different stake holders (Union workers rep, small business owner, European logistics expert). You can check it out here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?447082-1/panelists-discuss-pre...
The fake missed delivery notices USPS sends are widely reported in the media, Amazon is powerless to do anything and probably doesn’t care much to begin with, they change items from guaranteed to “expected” when USPS ships them.
Bear in mind that UPS’ (and I’m sure Fedex too) entire operation is in motion 24/7. The brown trucks return to base full of packages, most of which need to be pushed upstream to regional sort facilities to go to other areas. Those regional facilities and everything larger are basically working nonstop IIRC.
“Continuously delivery” would probably be difficult. Your typical truck will head out with 6-800 packages to be delivered in a 8-9 hour day, and they don’t all come in at once. Maybe you could send out trucks more often during the day, with fewer packages to be delivered over a larger area, but I’m not sure it would be that beneficial. You’d increase fuel and maintenance costs, plus you’d be paying your (fairly expensive) drivers to spend more time driving rather than delivering packages.
As a business owner I use UPS quite a bit to get things delivered to clients etc (during business hours) and I don't think twice about paying $70 for next day air delivery. I doubt online stores pay anything like that.
I’ve taken to using shipping depots for amazon shipments. There’s a 7-Eleven just down my street that I can ship things too and pick them up at my convenience. It’s easier than missing the delivery guy and dealing with redelivery, or worse, going to the UPS centre and getting it.
I wonder whether UPS’s business really is mostly residential. The business side is invisible to me - it could be huge, I don’t know. Does anyone have data?
This is strange. In my experience, shipping Hungary to Canada works best with UPS or Fedex but from Canada to Hungary it's DHL or trouble. In general, to the entire EU I vastly prefer DHL.
I couldn't find an exact number, but their 2017 10-K has the statement "Business-to-consumer shipments [represented]
more than 50% of total U.S. Domestic Package volume".
This. I have a post-office a 3 minute walk from my house, with long hours. The UPS drop-off is a pharmacy a 20-minute drive away that keep's bankers hours. If something ships to my house by UPS, I will get a paper notice that it's at the pharmacy and it appears there 2-4 business days later.
Why can't I just order it dropped at the post office for me?
Unfortunately UPS can’t do anything about that - only USPS is allowed to deliver to post offices and mailboxes. They have a federally mandated monopoly on those.
They have extended their delivery hours already. Most of my UPS packages come 7pm or later these days some even around 9pm even outside rush times like Christmas. There's just not enough hours available for them to do all residential deliveries during the 6/7-9/10 window when they could reasonably assume that people with 9-5 jobs would be home.
Also it's become exceedingly rare for UPS or Fedex to leave me a slip these days the only missed delivery because of signature requirements for me have been USPS attempting to deliver international packages, can't actually remember the last time UPS or Fedex has delivered a package requiring a signature.
I admittedly live somewhere that theft is unlikely to be an issue, but I now only get slips on the rare multi-thousand dollar item (plus the equally rare WTF "why do I have to sign for this?"). It used to be fairly common at the same location.
They leave it on my house's porch yeah. If it fits they stash it between the door and the storm door and if not it's tucked right up against the house hidden from the main road by a rather large bush (that I should stop putting off trimming).
Delivering residentials after dark is an absolute nightmare. Is that house on the corner 5647 or 5643? Is there one house or two houses down the gravel driveway? Hope you've been driving the route for 30 years and have your daily 200-stop route memorized, because it can be a pain to figure out even in broad daylight.
People tend to get suspicious of nighttime activities in the suburbs and exurbs. I'm not sure that would go over too well. But deliveries to lockers would make sense.
FedEx makes it easy for consumers. They bought Kinkos some years ago.
When a package is coming via FedEx, IHOP on their website, no registration required, and rerouted to the most convenient Kinkos. I pick it up when I want.
>Representing 260,000 UPS drivers, sorters and other workers, the union wants UPS to hire more full-time workers to help handle the surge in packages. It has opposed technology such as autonomous vehicles and drones and is wary of projects that do work with fewer employees.
This isn't tenable for the company. The union might be able to stall automation in UPS for a few years, but it'll end with UPS being unable to compete with its competitors. At that point UPS will have a lot more leverage in union negotiations because the alternative will be bankruptcy and everyone losing their jobs. Hopefully union leadership adopts a longer-term view before then.
That type of automation will probably knock out 1 in 5 jobs, or more.
The workforce will change. And those who don't move up the value chain (become robot technicians and programmers) will be pushed out.
I totally sympathize with the union and understand it's motivations. When things like healthcare are linked to having a job in America, replacing people with machines is rough.
Even if it does eliminate 20% of jobs (that number is way too high), opposing it in the short-run won't solve anything permanently, as the GP said. Then when UPS is losing money and facing layoffs, the leverage will be massive. The union needs to adopt a long-term strategy or risk getting destroyed 5-10 years down the road.
You are saying that you don't think UPS' automation efforts will reduce the effective workforce by 20% in the next decade? I would strongly disagree with your certainty, and believe if their per-package efforts don't decline by > 20%, they will consider their efforts a failure.
Also, it is possible the union sees no end-game in sight and is just trying to preserve jobs as long as possible. (The robots won't have a union, and if they did, this union would be unlikely to be a part of forming it.)
I think I agree that the UPS union's decision is possibly a poor one, but come on -- it's easy to see why they made it. Making self-interested, short-sighted decisions is literally what humans are best at.
(Plus, it's not like we can pretend to predict the future and better than they can!)
Amazon, with all of its technological and operations might, is pathetically terrible at their own last mile delivery operations (I'm going to discount them hauling trailers from distribution centers to USPS sort facilities; anyone can do that). To displace UPS and Fedex, you would require immense amounts of capital for your delivery network, and staff properly compensated and treated well for quality work (ie a union or benefits of sufficient quality, a union isn't required).
Arm chair "logistics experts" should go sling packages for a few weeks to see what it takes to compete with real operations before declaring existing operations dead if they don't "disrupt themselves". UPS, Fedex, and USPS aren't going anywhere.
While I agree that delivery logistics are not easy, I don’t think it is something that will take massive amounts of capital. Simply increasing the compensation for delivery people high enough to get competent full timers would likely solve the problem. And due to the union wages of ups, there is a lot of room to raise wages for drivers.
The trick with the capital requirements is Amazon is totally willing to contract out to small regional conpanies; so you can have big plans, but start small and grow, if it works out. There's room outside of Amazon delivery too.
> At that point UPS will have a lot more leverage in union negotiations because the alternative will be bankruptcy and everyone losing their jobs
The history of companies with incalcitrant unions isn’t the unions getting crushed at the last minute. It’s everyone losing jobs because the company goes bust.
It is tenable. We will be fine I think. The answer is to use the AI automation and humans in a symbiotic relationship where in the AI or the human would not be as effective without the other. Its easy to justify the workforce on the books if they are producing for example, 10x more than what they do now and despite the myth of unions, we actually have a ton of good employees who would jump at the chance to do some of this stuff.
The bottom line is that there are ways to make this work and be vastly profitable, but I think ultimately, the question is whether our management and union leaders will work to do that.
> At that point UPS will have a lot more leverage in union negotiations because the alternative will be bankruptcy and everyone losing their jobs. Hopefully union leadership adopts a longer-term view before then.
Unfortunately that's not usually how it works out. See for example, Hostess a couple years back. The union thought management was bluffing about their imminent bankruptcy, turns out they weren't.
I’m genuinely curious to hear this point of view. I don’t believe unskilled labor (or minorly skilled labor) has a right to a job anymore than a very skilled laborer does.
There’s a reason why cement trucks were created when you could (and can) still mix cement by hand. It’s wildly inefficient at a certain project scale, and I hold the same view for other items.
I’d love to know why you feel it’s socially wrong to push forward automation.
I assume people are against automation because it leads to more unemployed. In the future we will probably have most manual labor automated by robots and have massive amounts of people without jobs, no healthcare, barely surviving at all in terrible conditions.
But you know, its all their fault of course, they could've just learned to code!
I think the fear is exaggerated, automation has been happening throughout the history of mankind.
Should we not have vehicles because it put the horse/buggy drivers out of a job? Have cars made by hand and not by more efficient, safer automation because it puts people out of work?
I completely understand & respect that viewpoint that this does not all happen in a vacuum so the people working manual labor likely did not get or have access to the same opportunities as those "who learned to code".
Who is to say that the automation opens room for better-paying jobs or leads to innovations in health-care that make universal health care more affordable to tax-payers so it can get passed into legislation?
There's negative consequences of slowing automation as well.
I used to hold the same viewpoint - automation is nothing new - but this video by Kurtzgesagt (more specifically the statistics cited in it) convinced be is that automation actually IS different this time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk).
The big difference is that automation now replaces jobs at a pace that is faster than we can create them. The whole video is good but the particularly interesting stats are at the ~8:00 minute mark.
we never had a boston dynamic robot doing a backflip though. But I guess that's kind of my point, advances in robotics/AI/AGI can't be compared with the invention of the car, but that's exactly the argument that's going to justify a never seen before degree of poverty of masses of people.
Stopping or even slowing automation is though of course completely pointless on multiple levels, if a company isn't going to automate, their competitor will (and drive them out of business), if a country decides to legislate against automation another country will not, in the global economy its a futile effort.
Furthermore there really is no reason for people to "work" at all, if machines can do the same why not let people do what they want to do, instead of pointlessly enslaving humanity forever, that sounds pretty evil.
I really feel that it would do a lot of good in the world to hold back at least some automation of robot type jobs. We as a society need a bigger lead time in the education and social development areas to just expect large swaths of the population to sit around with nothing to do.
Granted, that is the ultimate goal of a would-be post scarcity economy. Unless we're switch to space communism and get matter replicators soon this will only result in social strife.
What do you mean? Have you seen switchboard operators? Surely internet packets displaced the phone companies!
What about most things that you own today? Surely the metals you come across the very electronic you’re typing away on didn’t come from a blacksmith?
I’m sure I could go ad nauseum but I hope you get my point. I’d believe you if you lived somewhere in the artic circle in a remote corner of that desert. But here you are on HN of all places!
They need to standardize package sizes. USPS, UPS, everyone. I know this would be ridiculous, but what about essentially milkcrate-like containers of standard stackable sizes with fixed rates for residential bullshit. Residential shipping has to be the biggest fucking pain in the ass- I know I've done it. I moved via UPS one time, packaging tons of random 3' square boxes with shit unpadded, the delivery people actually taped them back closed with my stuff inside. You should never accept those. Basically, have a few sizes of really over-built injection molded milkcrates with honeycomb for impact protection, and customers bring a box of crap to the store and pick out their crate, put all their stuff in, set it on the conveyor with their name/payment/etc and it rolls up to the front. A machine inflates a tight plastic bladder which secures the material inside, closes it, charges you and spits out a receipt.
There shouldn't be customer service. If you need to pick up your package, scan your ID or slip or something. If you have an address problem, you use the computer to ensure you're shipping it to the right place. Declarations are handled, and an impact resistant box would probably do well for all the stupid assholes shipping batteries, liquids, dead animals etc.
I know this wouldn't work for a lot of reasons and people would just keep the boxes, but maybe you can keep them from being taken out of the store, like you pull your cardboard box out of it or something.
You get to fill a cardboard box that's barely taped shut and that HAS to fit in the plastic crate. You can't take the crate home.
Both services already do this. They provide free boxes for you to use of standard sizes. So if you choose to ship in another dimension, you're bearing that cost. They incentivize you to use standard sizes.
> I know this wouldn't work for a lot of reasons and people would just keep the boxes,
Actually I think this could work if you offered some money for the empty crates, like with bottle deposits. You could keep the crates if you needed them, but you could also save them until you had a carload to take to the UPS Store and get some cash. If the fee were low enough, the shipping companies would still be saving money over buying zillions of cardboard boxes per year.
I'm not sure if the economics work out, but if we standardized and got USPS/UPS/FedEx/Amazon all on board, it could work.
It is interesting/surprising to me that there isn't the suggestion of auto-loading/unloading the trucks themselves. Is this one of those problems that seems pretty tractable from the outside looking in but it turns out there are some fundamental difficulties that aren't obvious at first but make it much more difficult than first imagined?
I could imagine the beds of the trailers being conveyer belts themselves that would "plug in" to the system at the sorting facility. From there the automation could take over. It would be something like training the robots to play a combination of Jenga and Tetris.
The loading of the trucks requires much more dexterity than a machine would be able to deliver. Also the packages themselves would be difficult for a machine as you get these huge pieces that come down the belt weighing 150 pounds and the weight isn't evenly distributed at all. In these cases we have to stop the belt and two loaders load the item quickly, and the belt is restarted. What happens when a package comes down a slide and busts open and gets over everything? This actually happens quite a bit.. one time a goats head came out of the package and blood went everywhere. Or better yet, what happens when a package accidentally has two labels instructing the package to go to two different trucks, perhaps even two separate parts of the facility? We call this a double label and it usually requires a human to sort it out.
There is a lot of idiosyncrasies like this with many of UPS' jobs. Automation will come not to take the paycheck from the low wage worker, but rather from the high wage worker such as driver dispatching, human resources, etc. Those people won't be fired though, most will be reassigned to over see some drivers I would imagine. That is a tough job and those people need all the help they can get.
Spent about a year loading and unloading at the Trabue UPS hub in Columbus back in the 90's. Everything you say is true. Unfucking the belt is something that is likely to be strictly a human endeavor for the next 20+ years.
There's no way automate it with the current hub architecture and today's technology. You'd literally have to have a stadium-sized package 'cache' where all package could be unloaded to, some machine vision doohickey to characterize every package, then have a solver identify the idealized load configuration, then picker bots go out and start streaming packages in order so that some high end robot could load the trailer with 90+ percent packing efficiency (which i believe we achieved as loaders getting paid $8/hr).
Then you'd still have to leave the last 8' of trailer space to handle the goats heads and exhaust pipes and all the other crazy shit that people just slap a label on and make someone else's problem. Maybe you could find a way to use air bladders or some kind of encapsulating foam to handle that, but mostly you'd just have to have a floater running from trailer to trailer to load that stuff.
> UPS is negotiating with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to renew a five-year contract, which expires July 31. Representing 260,000 UPS drivers, sorters and other workers, the union wants UPS to hire more full-time workers to help handle the surge in packages. It has opposed technology such as autonomous vehicles and drones and is wary of projects that do work with fewer employees.
> “The problem with technology is that it does ultimately streamline jobs,” says Sean O’Brien, a Teamsters leader in Boston. “It does eliminate jobs. And once they’re replaced, it’s pretty tough to get them back.”
It will be a sad day for a lot of people when UPS moves to automation.
Theyre one of the only companies left that still supports the 20th-century idioms of corporate loyalty-- with only a high school degree, you can start as a truck sorter and work your way up to a vaunted driver or stationmaster position over the course of your career.
Robots might improve a few things though, like safety. If they can not only account for spatial positioning but also weight, automatons might ensure trucks arent over- or unevenly-loaded.
Speaking awhile ago with an expert in this kind of automation, I was told that conveyor belts are much less reliable than I imagined.
Your idea also could be implemented using different tech: Think of the Amazon warehouse bots that lift entire shelving units and bring them to the people who pick items from them. Preloaded racks could be delivered into their places on the truck.
> Is this one of those problems ... ?
It also could be one of those problems that isn't a bottleneck and isn't worth automating.
Worked at UPS from ‘03 - ‘05. I can tell by the labels and codes on the packages I get that not much has changed since then. Didn’t know anything about programming at the time, but I still spent plenty of shifts daydreaming about how the job could be automated or at least done by trained monkeys. 15 years later I can look back and pretty confidently say that it’s a much more difficult problem than I thought at the time.
Loading semis is basically 3D Tetris where you have to consider not only shape (boxes, tubes, cylinders, and everything in between) and size (fits in the palm of your hand up to 2- 3m long), but weight (basically 0-75 kg) and rigidity. Humans pretty easily develop and intuition for these things. I certainly unloaded plenty of semis that were for all intents packed to capacity. In theory you could probably have some kind of fully integrated system that let you know ahead of time the details of every package so you could model the entire load and figure out how to fit it... but doing what humans do loading on the fly would be damned hard.
Loading package cars (the brown delivery trucks) drops the need to maximize volume carried and adds constraints about the order and location of packages so the driver can find them. Again though, it’s a fairly loose system. In theory the load is pretty well distributed across the truck’s numbered shelves by the planning system... except all the days that it isn’t. A loader ends up making a lot of on the fly calls to overflow shelves and rearrange things so they fit on the truck and the driver has a reasonable chance to find them.
tl;dr - Anything is possible, but automating that part of the process is an enormous challenge IMO.
Formally, this is the bin-packing problem, which is NP-hard. There are lots of heuristic and approximate methods for coming up with configurations, but hitting an optimal configuration is unlikely to be done in short order.
I imagine load distribution, box fullness, rigidity etc can be included as dimensions to optimise. It'd be necessary, really, but doesn't make things any easier.
This is, however, what I believe Amazon are trying to achieve. As you point out, they have the advantage of knowing in advance what the different items being packaged are. They can presumably optimise within a single box, over a single order and across multiple orders and shipments. At their scale it would make sense to devote a large amount of compute to squeezing a few percent extra out of each cargo flight and truck delivery.
The loading of a UPS semi might not look like this - at all... In addition to the criteria already mentioned by your parent-post, that need to be considered while loading, stability of the load is another important factor. The system in the video just stacks same-sized packages on top of each other, which is not the best approach. The reality is much more complicated as this. You might also be surprised, that the loading-speed shown is not that much faster than a human can do it.
Public Logistics Network suggested by Professor Michael Kay: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~kay/pln/
"A public logistics network is proposed as an alternative to private logistics networks for the ground transport of parcels. Using the analogy between the packages transported in the network and the packets transmitted through the Internet, a package in a public logistics network could, for example, be sent from a retail store and then routed through a sequence of public distribution centers (DCs) located throughout the metropolitan area and then delivered to a customer’s home in a matter of hours, making a car trip to the store to get the package unnecessary. The DCs in the network, functioning like the routers in the Internet, could also be located at major highway interchanges for longer distance transport."
One aspect of it is powered platforms that move boxes around without human intervention: "Modular storage design: In order to be cost-effective, the loading/unloading, sortation, and storage activities at each DC in the public logistics network must be highly automated since each load might visit a dozen or more DCs while it’s in transit, likely traveling on a different truck between each DC. Since existing automation technologies do not provide the flexibility needed to allow any size load to move to any location at anytime, a new DC design has been developed that would allow packages of varying size to be automatically unloaded at a DC, sorted, stored, and then loaded onto an outbound truck. Such a design would result in diseconomies of scale because it is cheaper to ship a single package compared to a larger consolidated load. Integral to the design is use of arrays of small square modules with orthogonal pop-up powered wheels."
That's a pretty good idea! Though my inclination was to think of a truck that dispenses (most) packages to the driver via a external hatch. Small win but possibly save a lot of bending, searching, and lifting.
>It is interesting/surprising to me that there isn't the suggestion of auto-loading/unloading the trucks themselves.
Surely UPS has already solved the logistics planning of putting the right packages with the right drivers, so what's left is prestaging the next truck load for a bot to pick and shift as soon as the truck returns. Although you could argue this means fewer jobs loading it could also potentially mean more jobs driving and frankly if a bot is doing the loading potentially less package damage from careless handling.
I worked loading and unloading at a FedEx ground sorting facility for a couple weeks 15 years ago; some of the trailers had rollers down the middle to speed loading and unloading. For the others we had rollers to put into the truck. But you wouldn't want the whole bed to be a conveyor, the sorting really needs one package at a time in the line, otherwise it's hard to scan and direct packages, and packages will get jammed at the turns.
Conveyor belts are designed carry packages, trucks carry pallets with 20-80 packages on them. Packages are loaded and unloaded onto transfer trucks in pallets. Conveyor belt will be useless in a truck bed. They could do one of those floors that cargo airplanes have where entire floor is tons of balls that enables you to slide anything across the area but then again special flat bottom pallets would be needed and those metal balls will make truck a lot heavier.
Non-UPS trucks the same size as UPS's carry much heavier loads. If the balls made sense in other respects, their weight would be much less of an issue for the truck than for an airplane.
I always wonder, why unionised workers won't pursue investment in technology that will make their jobs obsolete rather than fighting a futile war against the technology?
If you're an organisation of hundreds of thousands of workers, you probably can afford to invest in startups that can replace the jobs of the people you're representing. What's better, you already have a relationship with the client and your members have the know-how of the tasks and the business that's about to get automated.
If the investments fail, you keep your jobs. If your investments succeed, you no longer need to work to make living.
In a way, you're suggesting a cynical though (arguably) realistic stance. Which is logical, but a hard sell in the very political world of unions. A lot of these people have an emotional attachment to their job, or at least the idea of having a job.
Edit: In other words, you can't put a price on purpose.
The idea is interesting but intuitively I don't think the math works out. I understand the hedge angle, but done at large scale this type of investment -labor automation companies- is unlikely to yield very good returns (say, 10% yearly or so) and is therefore incapable of providing enough income for a worker to retire on (based on a plausible investment amount available to a unionized worker).
Good point, but the idea here is that if the workers invest in the inevitable future and turn automation into a passive income instead of total loss for them(as it will happen when their trade is robotised by someone else). They might as well invest in anything else however collectively investing in the business they understand and are part of could bring considerable advantages such as educated “bets” in the startups and structured job losses(as not everyone will lose their jobs to the automation at the same rate) and all the the benefits that come with scale as opposed to individual micro investments.
Yes but wouldn't be great for the workers if they had a stake in the company that makes the conveyor belt for example?
We all have seen the graphs showing that the efficiency in the businesses increased dramatically while the salaries stagnated.
Maybe they should pursue investment unions that are aiming to replace their jobs with technology so that they can take the rewards of the increased efficiency.
260K workers can provide the capital by investing a fraction of their salary.
A 4K a year on average per worker will provide 1 Billions $ a year to invest in technology to make UPS jobs obsolete.
There's no rule that one person or company should own all the machines that put people out of work, maybe it can be better for everyone if the machines are owned by a large number of private owners. Basically decentralised communism or if you want it to sound nicer, shared automation economy through crowdfunding.
This is largely in part to the same reason New York's subways are stuck in the 20th century: Unions. While they serve a vital function to prevent labor abuse, nowadays they are abused to prevent innovation.
The interesting thing from a German perspective is that over here, unions seem to have a much more positive influence on business decisions. I wonder where the difference is coming from.
In Germany union representatives regularly participate to management meetings.
Moreover the labour union system is completely different: unions represent all workers, and in each company there are usually different unions.
Unions are s small part of the problem at UPS - the smallest part arguably - and NYMTA, they're a bigger part of the problem, but not anywhere near all of it.
There is currently no technology that would allow UPS to fully automate, nor would even gain enough efficiencies that would repay the investments needed. The amusing thing to me is - now is probably the right time to fully automate sorting, the technology is much more mature and will likely have a longer lifetime before replacement, than the technology FedEx just installed.
NYMTA, could fully automate - but as a cost greater than building new subways from scratch - the largest issue NYMTA has is a lack of local control, a lack of funding (from Albany), and the tact that if the subways - any of them - shut down for any amount of time, the city devolves to gridlock.
Complicating factors for MTA are, outright corruption, an indifferent management, regulation that makes construction difficult, and a top down safety culture - that prioritizes eliminating the /appearance/ of risk, over reducing realistic risk.
the article talks about UPS as an old outdated and lagging behind its main competitor FedEx while in my experience as a regular shipper I have to say UPS is a lot more reliable with its delivery schedule and serving its shipper customers needs.
The article seems to be missing a lot of details. FedEx ground has a more modern capital plant because they bought an awful carrier and just completed a multi billion dollar capital program to build out facilities.
It also doesn’t mention that Fedex operates two companies ground and express. Most of the B2B stuff is via FedEx express.
IMO the actual information here is that UPS approached the market based on their long term plan and maximized utilization of their capital investments. Now they’re looking to invest in modernization. The question is, was it smarter to stay the course, learn from Fedex’s experience and lock into tech at a lower price, or should they have scrambled?
FedEx operates 3-4 shipping based companies. Freight [1] and Custom Critical [2] are seperate entities. Both of which operate independently.
The downside of fedex's seperate companies is there is a lack of logistical coordination at the national level. I.e. If they have a ground 28' trailer full at a smaller location and a separate 28' LTL Freight trailer, they will send two drivers instead of 1 long haul driver with a doubles configuration.
anecdotal background says -- pre-IPO the UPS company aggressively fired union employees and promoted low-power middle managers by the thousands, then got the IPO with a promise to expand to EU and Middle East, and then with loads of cash, blundered through execution with multiple public errors and mismanagement.
This is an opportunity for Amazon to thrive into. It already has a lot of experience in a related industry, combining that with logistics is only logical.
> It [Amazon] already has a lot of experience in a related industry, combining that with logistics is only logical.
Amazon is a logistics company, first and foremost. From order entry to delivery, they use their logistics systems to deliver whatever it is that you want to buy, from physical goods to movies to third parties' products.
I once read a foreign policy expert talking about drug cartels and why they all seemed to do human trafficking too, and why a terrorist organization tried to use them. The author said that the cartels started with drugs, but they have evolved into logistics organizations which specialize in illegal goods and bypassing customs. They have the means to ship things confidentially and without customs, and they'll put whatever you want to ship into their system. The author's point of view was that Wal-mart and Amazon are the same, but with legal goods and lawful business practices.
Amazon will for sure go after this industry. There's no doubt about that. But it's hard to tell how fast or aggressive are they going to pursue this opportunity.
The problem is that they will never be able to reach the potential in the market. Many shippers would refuse to do business with a competitor, and hiring random kids in moms minivan to schlep boxes won’t retain B2B.
Seems strange for Amazon to enter a business with low margins and a low ceiling.
Amazon shipping doesn't have to grow into a dominant position. All it needs to be is a big enough threat that they can negotiate better rates with outside parties.
Amazon is doing a very low margin business themselves. They already have their warehouses throughout the country, they can just start with going into delivering packages for their own business, and expand slowly into logistics for others.
amazon is doing a lot in this field already and unfortunately its not good news for regular folk who will be employed in that field.
UPS offers highest salaries and benefits to its unionized workers and drivers.
FedEx is ok with most of its drivers working as independent'owner operator' drivers.
Amazon hires staffing companies and locol third party fleet companies thus providing 0 benefits and job guarantees while paying lowest salaries in the industry.
Not sure why richest man in the world Bezos thinks Amazon should be paying less than $13/hr while both Apple store employees make $20/hr and up
I believe there is a key difference between Amazon and Apple that is worth mentioning.
Amazon is largely a reseller(bar it’s in house developed products like Kindle/Alexa and store branded products) with far lower gross margins than Apple.
Apple has the highest retail gross sales(and associated high margins) in the world.
Many look to Apple/Google/Facebook as leaders in compensation, benefits, perks.
But they are the exceptional companies that have wide Warren Buffett “moats” to protect their high margins.
McDonalds and Amazon(distribution operations, not software dev)have far more in common in value proposition and business model in terms of margins/compensation than Apple and Amazon.
Does Costco offer profit sharing and/or employee stock units?
Would,it be worth including that in the total long-term equation?
Every single hourly Amazon distribution worker from the first 5-7 years of the company would be multi-millionaires now had they exercised and held their options.
More recent hourly distribution employees of Amazon would have also done quite well in the most recent 5-7 years with stock units granted.
But I think you raise a good point about comparing Costco with Amazon.
I’d Be keen to compare their respective business models and total compensation systems for employees at the coalface.
On fedex, you are right about independent drivers - but they also contract to independent companies to do last mile deliveries and haul. I would think amazon would do the same as Fedex, which means these local companies would be inclined to switch to amazon if they get more business from them. Alternatively, these local companies would grow their business to handle both to de-risk their business.
With any WSJ article, just open twitter and copy&paste the title. Any link to WSJ from twitter will get around the paywall -- even tweets from the official WSJ twitter account.
I think we should have a website or something where you put in a pay-walled URL, and it does whatever trick or redirects you where-ever you can see it.
I was thinking of creating something similar for all of those US news sites that have blocked EU-based readers from accessing their sites out of a mostly unfounded panic. (PS: love your HN username.)
So all those US sites are just ignorant? They didn’t have lawyers actually advising them? They just unilaterally shut off access to millions of people out of an abundance of caution? “Unfounded panic” isn’t a business strategy and any non-trivial business is going to operate from legal advice. Obviously, the risk is real enough: the threat of 5% of global earnings is a pretty big incentive to be extremely cautious when dealing with an EU that has a huge financial incentive to go after large American companies.
I wouldn’t run my business with the “hope” that regulators are benevolent. If the media publishes a story critical of a country’s government, what’s to stop them from using GDPR as the basis for a very expensive witchhunt? Even if you have done everything correctly, there is still a significant compliance risk.
It isn’t the compliance itself that is problematic — it’s the compliance risk you subject yourself to when serving Europe. Given most news organizations are hanging by a thread financially, one bit of back luck from an aggressive regulator could destroy the business.
It’s the same reason many European banks have refused to service American customers: the FATCA compliance risk.
> They didn’t have lawyers actually advising them? They just unilaterally shut off access to millions of people out of an abundance of caution?
Those two statements are not mutually exclusive. I think they did have lawyers who advised them. They concluded that the potential risk is larger than the gain (in ads - europeans love their privacy and adblockers; and ad rates are comparatively quite low outside of the UK).
One, I think they should have hired european lawyers for this.
How do the writers of the articles get paid if everyone bypasses paywalls? They aren’t like musicians that make most of their money touring and their recorded music is more of a show-marketing tool. Most writers are almost anonymous.
I’m just having a hard time understanding the ethics of this.
Well, if a particular news site blocks europeans I would guess they are not expecting any kind of revenue from there.
I find it hard argue against a service that unblocks this kind of news site for europeans from an ethical POV. Copyright law is of course different, but it was you who introduced the ethics aspect.
