UPS to Offer Saturday Ground Delivery, Pickup Services
UPS announced that it will begin deploying a program later this month that offers Saturday ground delivery and pickup services. The carrier began testing the program in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Los Angeles in 2016, but further expansion is underway in these cities and broader deployment begins this month to 15 additional metropolitan areas including New York, Chicago and Boston. UPS plans to cover 4,700 cities and towns with the service by November, and in 2018, coverage will expand to more than 5,800 cities and towns. The time-in-transit improvement is one of the largest in the company’s 109-year-history. What’s more, this planned expansion is expected to create 6,000 new UPS jobs nationwide when operations are fully implemented.
Total Retail's Take: Saturday service will greatly enhance the experiences of online shoppers, since Saturday ground pickups will enable retailers using a ship-from-store strategy to achieve Monday deliveries for the vast majority of the U.S. population. This is important, especially since the UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper study reported that 46 percent of customers abandon shopping carts for reasons that include the shipping time taking too long. Furthermore, shippers can benefit from this additional operating day because it enables them to add a sixth day to ship and receive, providing an opportunity to turn inventory faster, use space more efficiently and increase productivity.
