A LETTER TO OUR RETAIL PARTNERS FROM THE LINK LEADERSHIP TEAM
In light of recent news regarding an impending UPS strike on August 1, we encourage all our customers to book and schedule delivery for your fall/Christmas orders as soon as possible.
The UPS strike would have an immediate, yet long-lasting impact on the supply chain for the remainder of the year. According to Forbes: “A 10-day strike would potentially be the most expensive strike in US history affecting more than 4.6 BILLION dollars on customer losses.” This strike would affect us all tremendously.
Our salespeople will visit your stores, take inventories, share vendor specials, and help you plan for fall. Please take advantage of this show season time and place your orders now to help ensure deliveries in a more timely manner than if you delay. If you placed future ship orders in Atlanta you may want to have the vendors proceed with shipping these orders now. We’ll help you navigate what could be a challenging time for shipments.
Don’t hesitate to contact The Link reps or our customer service team for anything. Thank you again for your partnership. We never take these relationships for granted. It should be a great fall and Christmas ‘23!
GHTA MEMBER PAUL RUDDEL, FROM TOTAL BIZ FULFILLMENT, SHARES THOUGHTS ON THE UPS SITUATION
We tend to think an agreement will be reached prior to the deadline. If it does occur, we do not expect it to be a long strike as there is too much at stake for all parties involved, especially the US economy. We are working on the following backup/contingency plan for our small parcel shipments if the UPS strike occurs: 1. Reroute shipments with FedEx. We recommend opening a FedEx account if you do not have one or contacting your FedEx rep to see what volume FedEx will accept. 2. Use USPS for remaining shipments FedEx will not accept. 3. Lower your Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) weight threshold to allow more shipments to ship LTL. 4. UPS does have a contingency plan to continue to pickup and deliver packages. We expect if the strike does occur, this option would be at a much-reduced capacity to standard UPS volume. If UPS does strike, we are expecting delays in delivery times. We also expect the other carriers’ service guarantees to be waived for the affected timeframe.