Since the beginning of March, when covid-19 was declared a pandemic, it has caused widespread changes in all our lives. One major change is the way we buy things. In shops, buying had reduced to online shopping or e-commerce. This put a huge strain on companies like Amazon and FedEx to deliver consumer goods on time even though they were getting much larger traffic than they could come with.
An estimated three billion packages will take this festive season through the nation’s shipping infrastructure — about 800 million more than delivered last year.
Whether packages get delivered or not could break smaller retailers who have seen much less revenue due to the lockdowns and traffic in their stores.
Many brands are trying to deliver before Christmas day and have set deadline days for items to be purchased. For example, Beatrice Bakery has set a deadline of 9th December, and Disney Store has theirs on 10th December.
Shipping companies have expanded their delivery serviced and hired more people to deal with the greater number of deliveries they have to make. “Demand exceeds capacity, no matter what part of the country you are in,” said Satish Jindel, president of ShipMatrix.
To make up for the increased numbers, these shipping companies are hiring more workers. FedEx is 70,000 seasonal employees, and UPS, 100,000. Amazon, 100 new fulfillment warehouses, sorting centers, and delivery facilities across North America. The company has hired 275,000 full-time and part-time workers since the start of the year and 100,000 seasonal workers.
Hopefully, all this enough to get packages to arrive in time with minimal delays, and everyone has a great festive season.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/business/ecommerce-shipping-holiday-season.html
3 comments:
I hope everyone is able to get their packages on time, but the closer we get to Christmas the greater the chance of delays. On the other side of this a lot of workers were hired to meet this demand, but a lot are only seasonal. What is going to happen to all these workers when the large demand drops? Are they going to be able to find other jobs or will this contribute to more unemployed workers?
I think this is a very interesting topic. I order a lot of stuff recently and got it quicker than ever before. Interestingly, this probably means a lot more people are being hired in this field. Even if it is temporary it is still a good thing as people need quick money to make ends meet in this pandemic. Hopefully, with the vaccine coming out soon everything could get better. Hence, making these employments good support to hold the employment rates and economy through turbulent times.
I think this is something that will be looked at closely, and how these firms fullfil the demand that is alot more during this period of time. But what is worring here is that they are hiring people, but seasonally and once this is over they will be unemployed, thus how will they find other jobs? there should be some incentives for the workers in this special scenairo.
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