UPS to Deliver Ground Packages on Saturdays
UPS announced the company will start delivering Ground packages on Saturdays, starting in April 2017. The new service will also allow for packages to be picked up on Saturdays, allowing shippers to expedite delivery to their ecommerce buyers earlier in the week. Packages picked up on Saturdays can now travel across many shipping zones and be delivered on Monday or Tuesday.
These moves are in response to growing demand from ecommerce shoppers. This is one of the biggest time-in-transit changes in the company’s 109-year history.
“The addition of another ground operations day more efficiently utilizes our existing delivery network and offers customers an even faster ground delivery solution,” Teresa Finley, UPS’s chief marketing officer, said in a company press release.
UPS began testing the Saturday delivery program in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia in 2016. Further expansion is underway in those three test markets, and broader deployment begins this month for the following metropolitan areas:
- Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY
- Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI
- Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH
- Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO
- Indianapolis-Carmel, IN
- Knoxville, TN
- Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI
- New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA
- Pittsburgh, PA
- San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
- Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
- St. Louis, MO-IL MSA Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX
- Syracuse, NY
- Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL
UPS says nearly 4,700 cities and towns are planned to be covered by November 2017, just in time for the holiday shipping season. Coverage will expand to more than 5,800 cities and towns in 2018.