July 11, 2015
Next Wednesday is Amazon Prime Day, a huge promotion that one postal expert predicts will overwhelm the U.S. Postal Service.
Amazon is celebrating its 20th anniversary on July 15 with a one-day online shopping event that will offer âmore deals than Black Fridayâ to members of Amazon Prime, including those who sign up for a free 30-day trial membership.
âIt will be interesting to see how USPS handles what is sure to be a major onslaught of Amazon package deliveries, with Amazon Prime two day shipping after the one day sale,â writes Lisa Bowes of Intelisent, a company that advises direct mailers. âWill Prime Day impact delivery for other classes of mail? My guess is â probably soâŠâ
A look at the numbers indicates she is correct â that the Postal Service will struggle to handle the surge of Amazon packages without hurting delivery of other types of mail, even with massive overtime.
In a filing this week with the Postal Regulatory Commission, Amazon said it had 15 sortation centers at the end of 2014, with more on the way, that each prepare âtens of thousandsâ of packages per day to be handed off to the USPS for final delivery. That indicates that USPS delivers several hundred thousand âParcel Selectâ packages to Amazon customers on a typical day.
The e-commerce giant uses a variety of package-delivery services, but clearly the Postal Service is the favorite because of its ability to deliver to residential customers seven days a week at relatively low cost. Amazon has built an extensive logistics network that bypasses most of the Postal Serviceâs own network and delivers packages early every morning directly to the USPSâs destination delivery units (DDUs), where letter carriers pick up mail to be delivered later that day.
Source: Dead Tree Edition: Is the Postal Service Primed for Amazon Prime Day?