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American Morning
UPS Busy for Holidays
Aired December 18, 2001 - 09:46 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Seven days to go. Ho ho ho! If you're like most people, you are just now mailing that Christmas package now fully expecting it to arrive in time, by next Tuesday.
If you are sending that gift by United Parcel Service, you're not alone; let's go to CNN's Rusty Dornin, in San Francisco. She is inside a West Coast UPS facility on what is said to be the company's busiest day of the year.
Good morning, Rusty.
RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.
They call it peak day. This is peak week, leading up to Christmas. On peak day, they expect to ship 18 million packages worldwide. Put that in perspective, usually on an average day, it's 13 million packages. Also, the company officials say the company on the busiest day ships 10 percent of the U.S. gross national product, which is a pretty impressive number.
Right after September 11, the numbers did fall for UPS, about 10 percent. That came back up in mid-October. They are now reporting that their numbers are up for the holiday shipping, over the numbers for last year.
The folks that know best what we're sending out for Christmas are the people who load the trucks. We are here in the hub facility in south San Francisco. I'm with Daniel Brickley, who is one of the loaders here.
Daniel, you have seen a surge. What are you seeing people buying this holiday season?
DANIEL BRICKLEY, UPS TRUCK LOADER: We are seeing a big increase in the amount of packages that we are seeing ordered online, such as these amazon.com boxes and a lot of the other online line orders from companies, as well as telephone orders, such as QVC. So it seems like people are a lot more comfortable with that now, with the online ordering.
Also, the next-day air boxes, which is the service that we have with next-day shipment. We are seeing a lot of that, which means that a lot of people are rushing their packages.
DORNIN: Also, for the retail stores...
BRICKLEY: The corporate stores are receiving a lot more. A lot of the stores that sell clothing to teenager, like Hot Topic, and a lot of the children's stores -- and lot of the shoe stores. So people are buying a lot of that.
DORNIN: Take us on a tour. You take these off the belt, and you load them in the trucks. Take us on a little tour here of how you load these things.
(CROSSTALK)
BRICKLEY: All of the streets that are in a similar area have the same sequence number, and you sequence the number and put it inside the truck. You can see, like these, 443 -- so we put all of those over here.
What the problem is we are get so much volume because of the peak season that it is hard to keep all the sequence numbers together. The stops are going way over. This truck was supposed to have 180 stops; it will probably end up having about 200 today because of all the peak that we're getting. As you see, we are just stacking the packages on top of each other, trying to fit them inside the trucks. It's kind of like playing Tetris.
DORNIN: What do you hate to see? When you are loading and trying to get these trucks together and organize these drivers, what are the things you are hating to see.
BRICKLEY: What you hate to see is when you get really big packages that have something really light inside of them, such as this one here, which only weighs about 2 or 3 lbs., but you can see it is about 4 or 5 feet long. So there is nowhere to put it except right here. So now, when I am loading packages, I might accidentally walk into it, because it is so big and gets in the way.
DORNIN: People don't think about this, but how important is it for the driver that you are doing this properly?
BRICKLEY: It is very important, because if you don't get it right and the packages are mixed up in the truck, what is going to happen is he is going to end up having to backtrack and go back to places he's already been because he missed a delivery because that package was somewhere lost inside the truck.
DORNIN: He is probably not too happy with you if he is making 170 stops.
BRICKLEY: No way. He is going to be out until 9:00 at night; he will be really upset.
DORNIN: Daniel Brickley, who is a peak season employee for UPS. They hire about 40,000 every year for the holiday season.
It looks like good numbers this year, as we were saying, but if you want to get your things there by Christmas, UPS officials say you better be shipping by ground today and tomorrow and by air by the end of the week -- Paula.
DORNIN: Rusty, thanks so much.
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