FedEx Green?
June 10th, 2010 by johnShopping online? Getting your packages shipped to your door. Saves you driving out to the mall and back, and with companies like FedEx making efforts to use greener vehicles and cut fuel consumption, surely having them handle the delivery must be the environmentally sound thing to do (assuming, of course, you really need what you ordered!).
I thought so too. And keeping fuel costs to a minimum not only makes sense for the planet, but should also help FedEx save some money. Then I saw a tracking record for a package that was being shipped to me from a city around 40 miles from my home:
According to Google Maps, the FedEx Oakland location that the package arrived at last night is 7.5 miles from my home, the package’s destination. Around 6:30am today it left there, and I assumed it would be on one of their delivery trucks heading here. But no, look where they sent it – Memphis, Tennessee!
Somebody at FedEx in Oakland actually loaded a package for delivery to an address less than 10 miles from where they stood on to a plane, and then flew it approximately 1800 miles to their hub in Memphis. At some point today, probably without even considering the stupidity or cost (to the planet and to FedEx) of these actions, another worker at FedEx in Memphis will load the package back on a plane, and send it back to Oakland – another 1800 miles.
So, my little package will have travelled around 3600 extra miles. Nothing green about that, and no matter how fuel efficient your vehicles, this is never going to be the right thing to do.
I actually called FedEx to see whether this was some kind of mistake. Perhaps the web site tracking information was wrong, or perhaps the parcel had accidentally been put in the wrong box. But no, from what the very kind customer service person told me, it seems that it is normal to route packages through their hub in Memphis like this.
Do other shipping companies work this way too?
June 10th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by John Gordon, John Gordon. John Gordon said: Hey @FedExDelivers, any comments on this: http://blog.vertography.com/2010/06/10/fedex-green/ [...]
June 10th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
You need to keep in mind that singe packages do not tell the whole story. Having a few central hubs that all packages pass through often results in lower average travel, since central hubs allow the company to have fewer shipments, and less empty room in those shipments. You can be sure that no delivery company will intentionally ship a package further than it has to. Not due to environmental concerns, but because it makes economic sense.
June 10th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Sure, it makes sense to send all the packages heading somewhere other than Oakland to a hub, and take advantage of the efficiency of a larger vehicle. It will never make sense to send a package from the Oakland sorting facility to a hub 1800 miles away, and then send it back to the very same sorting facility in Oakland for delivery the next day. That is just poor routing. Their software should have been able to tell them that the package was at its destination sorting facility. In fact, the tracking does indicate that: “Jun 9, 2010 10:05 PM – At dest sort facility – OAKLAND, CA.” Then they sent it to Memphis anyway!
September 13th, 2010 at 8:53 am
Unfortunately no routing software will substitute for common sense or employees who lack it. This way may have cost FedEx more and have been less green, but no one would get fired because the ‘system’ said so. Welcome to big business: economies of scale apparently outweigh the diseconomies of incompetence.