Shipageddon

a) It's not fun for my client base. Orvis gets blamed for disappointing customers when it is FedEx and UPS that failed to respond to COVID (and asking them to properly respond to this surge is asking too much, I get it ).

b) It's not fun for customers.

c) It's not fun for FedEx / UPS employees who haven't done anything wrong and have to deal with frustrated customers and clients.

d) It's more fun for Amazon, who invested in delivery alternatives.

e) It's not optimal that my client base wasted twenty (20) years of e-commerce prosperity not developing alternatives to FedEx and UPS. On the surface, you'd think the e-commerce industry might band together and figure out how to apply leverage and/or create an alternate solution. But I remember working at Lands' End in the early 1990s, measuring the impact of customers who received packages via "Alternate Delivery" solutions, so it's not likely to happen.

I realize it is terribly hard to just keep the wheels on the business bus right now ... with employees working from home and unprecedented demand for many e-commerce brands and illness/death plaguing some of us. Try to allocate a small amount of bandwidth to thinking about how packages will get from your warehouse to the customer in the future, and then develop a plan, ok?