We had an envelope Fedexed to us Friday, to arrive Monday. It went out from Lynn, MA, leaving the Peabody office in the evening. That is about 60 miles from here. It went next to Memphis, TN, about 1300 miles from here, and then came back the 1300 miles, to Londonderry, about 20 miles from here. So it has come about two-thirds of the way here so far, with a 2600-mile detour.
Presumably, it is all about the airport. Peabody is 15 miles from Logan in Boston, and everything that is not supposed to get delivered from their office presumably just goes on a plane to Memphis, where it gets sorted and put on other planes. It's hard to accept that this is the most efficient way of doing things.
FedEx *never* does any local sorting. It *all* goes to Memphis, gets sorted there, and then sent to its final destination. That's FedEx's key to their business plan. (I believe that sorting once also reduces misrouted packages, but I don't recall where I saw that.)
ReplyDeleteWhat's a few thousand miles between friends?
ReplyDeleteThe key is cost per package. I'm willing to bet that the ride to and from Memphis with thousands of other letters is a modest fraction of the total cost, and probably less than the cost of fuel, labor, and truck to get it from Londonderry to Goffstown, on that basis. It's certainly cheaper per package to do it that way than to run a truck from Lynn to Goffstown, even assuming that you could pick up and deliver at intermediate stops, unless you were willing to wait until sufficient packages needed to move along that route.
ReplyDeleteA crazy business model to be sure - but it works. Founder Fred Smith conceived of the FedEx approach while in business school and was given a "C" for his efforts. Real-world beats academia.
ReplyDeleteFounder Fred Smith conceived of the FedEx approach while in business school and was given a "C"...
ReplyDeleteThat was one of my father's favorite stories. That and the founding of The Varsity restaurant in Atlanta, which was a similar tale: a Georgia Tech dropout who swore to dismissive teachers that he'd open a hamburger joint across the street and make more money than them. Which he did, of course, many times over.