DHL Now Using UPS in the US

It looks like the economy is having an impact on the overnight freight carriers and the people who use their services. According to an August 16, 2008 New York Times article entitled “Deliveries, Speed Not Quite of the Essence,” “…DHL Express, the country’s third-biggest overnight deliverer, recently hired a rival, United Parcel Service, to handle its air cargo operations in the United States.”

It seems that overnight freight shipments are down anywhere from 5 percent to 15 percent year to year. When you get to 30% fuel surcharges people begin to question whether the package really needs to get there the next day. In fact, it makes you wonder if a lot of those packages we send really need to be there overnight. 

Thanks to modern communications, we are all so used to things happening instantly that we may sometimes default to shipping a package overnight without thinking about it. Well, apparently people now are thinking about it and it is likely that we are going to see a permanent slacking off in overnight deliveries.  

So two things to think about:

• The next time you need to send a package in the US realize that if you are going DHL you are really going UPS.
• The next time you are going to overnight a package . . . don’t.