Fed Ex Projecting December 10, 2012, To Have Heaviest Volume in Its History. As In, Today.

Well, the recession may or may not be over. The Fiscal Cliff may or may not be looming. Unemployment may or may not be down.

But someone's out there buying stuff - and then shipping it somewhere.

Fed Ex, as the headline states, is expecting Monday, December 10th, 2012, to be the heaviest volume day in its history. The US Postal Service is expecting the following Monday, December 17th to be its biggest day.

As to why, there are several explanations. Pent up demand after several years of downbeat economic news; the uncertainty of the Presidential election and the increase in ecommerce are all contributors to this record.

Is such volume growth sustainable? The Law of Large Numbers begins to kick in at some point, suggesting that growth will slow because it will simply require too much additional volume for the population and economy to support. Fed Ex, UPS and the world's postal services are not adding capacity so they should be fine from a cost management standpoint. And most of their increased labor costs are seasonal - and variable. Whether logistics management or other sources of their future growth comes is a bit uncertain. But we'll worry about that after the holidays. JL

Sonja Isgur reports in the Palm Beach Post:

You think you have a lot of packages to ship? FedEx officials say it expects to move more than 200 packages per second today.

We’ve had Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and a couple nameless, list-making days since to get that holiday shopping done, which brings us to what FedEx reports will be its busiest day not just this year but in company history.
About 19 million packages are expected to run through FedEx’s networks today, according to a statement the company issued Friday.

The company said that an increase in online shopping is contributing to the record volume at FedEx which is expected to be a 10 percent jump over last year. (FedEx quoted eMarketer which forecast that online holiday sales would climb 17 percent from last year.)

Santa may have a sleigh, but FedEx boasts that in addition to more than 660 aircraft and 90,000 vehicles, its employees also drive boats, gondolas and electric tricycles.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service projects that Dec. 17 will be its busiest day with about 658 million packages, letters and holiday postcards. When the service tallies all those items, its workers deliver about 15.2 billion items between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.

The Postal Service is projecting a 20 percent increase in holiday package volume over last year - that about 365 million packages in the month of December alone. On average USPS processes about 528 million pieces of mail, but during the holidays, that jumps to 560 million, according to USPS officials.