Online sales now account for 10% of all shopping and 15% during the holidays, according to research firm Forrester. And as The Associated Press reports, that leaves FedEx and UPS with a combined 947 million packages to deliver between Black Friday and Christmas Eve—up 8% from last holiday season’s forecasts.
For UPS, the key to getting all those last-second orders delivered on time is Worldport, a massive sorting facility located between the Louisville, Kentucky, airport’s two main runways. On a typical night, 1.6 million packages pass through the facility. Just before Christmas, there can be 4 million, peaking tonight.
UPS plans to deliver about 36 million packages on Tuesday, its busiest day of the year, up from 35 million last year. That includes all of Worldport’s shipments plus those traveling by truck.
Standing next to the runways in Worldport on a recent night, jet headlights could be seen lined up miles away. Every 60 seconds another plane landed on one of the two parallel runways and pulled up to the facility—the size of 90 football fields—to unload its goods.
If everything goes right, the packages are just touched twice by humans: first when pulled out of large aircraft shipping containers and then again at the end of their journey through the conveyors and into a new bin and another jet.
At first glance, Kentucky doesn’t seem like the epicenter of holiday shipping. After all, Louisville isn’t the geographic center of the U.S. And this city of 600,000 people is hardly the largest in the country. Best known for its wooden baseball bats and being home to the Kentucky Derby, the city does, however, have relatively good weather and a geography that is perfect for shipping. FedEx has a similar operation in Memphis, Tennessee.
Typically, it only takes 13 minutes for a package to travel the web of belts and chutes at the Worldport facility. In a five hour period on a recent night, 130 planes landed, unloaded, reloaded and returned to the skies. In another part of the complex, 300 trucks do a similar dance. Up to 416,000 packages can be processed each hour.
