The Wall Street Journal reports that United Parcel Service (UPS) plans to hit big shippers - companies that ship more than 25,000 packages a week - with "hefty fees" during the upcoming end-of-year holiday shopping season.
According to the story, "The fees will test the ability of large retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp. to offset costs during a holiday season when skittish shoppers will avoid crowded stores and rely more on online orders … The newly planned fees come as UPS as well as rival FedEx Corp. try to offset significantly higher costs from the influx of packages flowing through their network."
The fees, the Journal writes, "could total as much as $3 a package for ground shipments and other lower-priced shipping options and up to $4 a package for air shipments bound for residences. That is significantly higher than the last time UPS instituted additional fees during a peak holiday season, in 2018. Surcharges then reached 28 cents on ground shipments and up to 99 cents for some air shipments."
- KC's View:
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I have a question about this.
In normal times, wouldn't a company want to give best customers lower fees and lower prices than less active customers?
I get that these are not normal times. E-commerce is accelerating, and expensive. And the US Postal Service (USPS) seems less and less dependable as an option with every passing day. But I'm sort of surprised that the e-commerce retailers and shipping companies couldn't come up with a better way of doing this that didn't seem to penalize success.
