America Is Drowning in Packages - The Atlantic
Even in the Amazon age, the volume of packages now delivered in the U.S. can sound completely absurd. In 2000, the United States Postal Service—the country’s biggest parcel shipper—delivered 2.4 billion packages. By 2022, that number had ballooned to 7.2 billion. UPS now handles 5.2 billion domestic packages annually, versus the 3.2 billion it handled in 2000, and Amazon’s logistics operation, which did not start delivering its own packages in earnest until 2018, has become the country’s third-largest shipper, delivering almost 5 billion (but not nearly all) of the company’s packages last year. And all of these packages are going to a customer base that has been trained by retailers to expect packages to arrive in just a few days—far faster than turnaround expectations used to be.