UPS is offering customers Saturday ground delivery and pick-ups services for the first time, expecting to create 6,000 new jobs when fully implemented in the USA.
With what has been coined as #UPSsaturday delivery, residential and commercial recipients can get ground packages that would have usually arrived on Monday, on Saturday. This is thanks to Saturday ground pick-ups from businesses allowing deliveries one business day earlier than before.
The time-in-transit changes are one of the largest in the company’s history, and are expected to be fully implemented nationwide by the end of 2018.
UPS began testing the Saturday delivery program in Atlanta, Florida; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Los Angeles, California in 2016. Further expansion is underway in these cities and broader deployment will begin in April in an additional 15 metropolitan areas including New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois; and Boston, Massachusetts.
By November, nearly 4,700 cities and towns are planned to be covered in time for the busy holiday period. In 2018, coverage will expand to more than 5,800 cities and towns.
Teresa Finley, chief marketing officer for UPS, said, “The addition of another ground operations day more efficiently utilizes our existing delivery network and offers customers an even faster ground delivery solution.
“This is an exciting addition to our suite of services and we are confident that it will help our customers capture market growth.”
Shippers across multiple industries ranging from automotive to healthcare will also benefit from the additional operating day as it will enable them to add a sixth day to their operations to ship and receive, providing an opportunity to turn inventory faster, utilize space more efficiently, and increase productivity.
The cities that will be added, in addition to the three test markets of Atlanta, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, are:
Indianapolis-Carmel, IN MSA (metropolitan statistical area);
St Louis, MO-IL MSA, Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX MSA;
Tampa-St Petersburg-Clearwater, FL MSA;
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA MSA;
Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH MSA;
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA MSA;
Syracuse, NY MSA;
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA MSA;
Pittsburgh, PA MSA;
Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY MSA;
Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI MSA;
Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO MSA;
Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI MSA;
Knoxville, TN MSA.
April 4, 2017