HOW CONSUMERS CONTRIBUTED TO CHRISTMAS DELIVERY PROBLEMS: “We are a nation that buys a lot of stuff late.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Glenn, good link regarding the role of buyers in the FedEx/UPS problems. There’s blame all around. However, what’s big enough to affect both companies so much? Draw a line straight from “deliveries were late” to “more than half the country is already covered in snow” and you’re onto something. I work at a FedEx Ground/Home terminal and if it got to us. it got delivered, despite our three consecutive record days the week before Christmas (normal peak is around 12,000 on the heaviest days of the season, where this year we topped at 14,400-odd). We had a day, though, when there was not much because of weather, and those heavy days were heavier than they’d have been due to weather (pumping through more at the hubs to make up for stuff having piled up). It’s essentially a just-in-time system. The 2nd biggest hub in the world shut down for 3 days. When the stuff flooded through, one of the nearest other terminals to us ended up with trailers parked in their yard, unable to process and send it all out on vans, and apparently never caught up. A new terminal in the state, being less experienced, had 10,000 packages backed up in their yard but got them all out on the 23rd and 24th because those days were light. We kept up so well (we’re one of the highest paid terminals in the country for a reason), I didn’t realize just how crazy it was until the same day the “UPS and FedEx are evil and incompetent” news hit big.

I thought global warming would have fixed that by now.