Quote:
Originally Posted by Manabi
<snip>
Also: I don't know how the hell they pull off Monday delivery for Prime items ordered on Sunday, but I'm not going to complain!  |
At one time, UPS and, I think FedEx, did not transport packages from one location to another on the weekends, at all. I think that that has changed. Home deliveries were "never" done, although both may have made exceptions at a greatly increased price if Christmas or Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday or Sunday and the customer had to have something delivered then.
Occasionally I'll see a UPS local-delivery style truck out and about here in town on a Saturday. I suppose that they have some special, extremely-urgent kind of stuff that they do deliver on Saturdays.
That doesn't really address what you said, though. I think that there are two factors at work. Number 1--Amazon is not your typically-sized business. Their business with carriers has to be enormous. Any company is going to stretch the policy a little bit or more--whatever is necessary--to make sure that they get Amazon's business and not one of their competitors! Related to that, large shippers have always negotiated with carriers to get lower rates than the official rates (that would be ones like you or I or my little business pay). If the carriers will stretch their delivery charge policy and rates, they are certainly going to be willing to stretch their policies on days of pickup and delivery (BTW--UPS, FedEx,
et al. have traditionally been shippers primarily to businesses. Hence, the fact that they usually delivered only Monday-Friday, and not Saturdays or Sundays when businesses are largely closed). And if a business like Amazon has 10,000 packages that they want sent out from a distribution center on Sunday, the carrier, of course, is going to make sure that they find a way to get them picked up.
A second factor at work is that your UPS (for example) package(s) delivered on Saturday may have actually been delivered by the Postal Service. In the last decade or so, USPS has tried to be less set in its ways (as government agencies tend to be) and let other carriers handle packages that have to travel long distance (they get it done, for whatever reason, faster than the Postal Service), and receive packages from other carriers for them (the Postal Service) to do the actual delivery, etc.
So, your package is going to get picked up at Amazon on Sunday, be on a truck to your town Sunday night, and be delivered by the carrier the next day, or possibly handed off to USPS to deliver on Monday with their regular deliveries. With the density of their distribution centers being what it is (meaning there's going to be one not all that far from where you live), it's not that hard of a feat to carry out.
Perhaps you've heard about Amazon's plan to deliver packages by drone (they actually may be testing this in certain test markets). In that case, you could, in the future, place your order on Sunday, and get it on Sunday!