Amazon disrupts as UK couriers prepare for tough Christmas

The balance of power is changing in the UK parcel delivery market. Amazon is also a major confusion as it challenges Royal Mail, the market leader that is expected to be one of the toughest Christmass for UK courier companies.

With Labor market is the tightest in 40 years Worker availability is expected to determine the success or failure of deliveries this season, and Amazon is in control with a £ 1,000 bonus to attract staff.

US tech giants have also increased their Christmas workforce to about 75,000 this Christmas, jumping from less than one-third of the pre-pandemic Royal Mail’s peak workforce to nearly half the size.

Two major groups in the UK market have 20,000 seasonal staff to handle record orders after the online surge during a pandemic in the fight against rivals Hermes, DHL, UPS, DPD and Yodel. It is additionally adopted.

“The problem from now to Christmas is one of the availability of the workforce,” said Tom Forbes, Senior Vice President of Careers at Metapack. This software links the delivery hub with the shipping company.

The epidemic of Omicron variants has also exacerbated recruitment challenges, with Royal Mail workers absent almost twice as much as Christmas 2018, causing serious problems at delivery offices.

Indeed, recruitment is becoming more and more important as pandemics supercharge e-commerce and condense years of growth into months. According to technology group Pitney Bowes, UK airlines delivered 5 billion units last year, or 14 million units a day, an increase of one-third in 2019.

It is expected to grow to about 5.7 billion this year, and early signs indicate that this Christmas peak could approach last year’s volume challenge. During the Black Friday week, when the peak season begins, orders on technology provider Metapack’s systems increased 11% year-on-year, but fell below the previous year’s week.

However, the surge in demand has separated Brexit from the UK workforce, with workers, especially truck drivers, as the coronavirus retires and changes careers. And this year the pool of temporarily dismissed workers is not ready to set foot.

Due to the shortage, Yodel raised the driver’s salary by 16% in October and made additional efforts to keep the driver ahead of the busy season, according to CEO Mike Hancox.

But frontline workers are still under pressure and cracks are beginning to emerge.

According to Metapack, some carriers have reported a 20% drop in delivery processing rates in some warehouses due to labor shortages and bad weather.

At Royal Mail’s Jubilee Mail Center in western London, Chuck Berry’s “Go, Johnny, Go!” Mail carrier desperately blew up the radio, but at the company’s legacy letter-only sorting station. , Mail and luggage were neatly packed in a delivery bag.

“I’m busy. Paul Bishop, one of the postal workers preparing to go out and deliver the goods the week after Black Friday, said:

Delivery driver MJ Sebastian, who works for an Amazon subcontractor in Milton Keynes, said he had to deliver 300 pieces a day, doubling from last month.

“It’s busy, it’s raining, and no one helps us. They don’t think how much pressure they put on the staff,” he added.

In addition to recruiting activities and bonus offers, the U.S. group is using technology in locations such as Milton Keynes to push drivers and provide more services with a system that aggregates multiple addresses in one “stop.” It offers.

Drivers say many of the addresses are within walking distance of each other, but the group claims that it sets realistic expectations and strives to prevent workers from being exposed to excessive pressure. doing.

Other groups are also actively hiring. The DPD said it focused on hiring full-time staff before the peak, citing a £ 150m investment in Leicestershire’s automated parcel sorting hub as a major help.

“The real headaches that can occur at this time of the year are generally things that we have no direct control over, such as traffic and weather,” he added.

Marek Różycki, managing partner of consultancy Last Mile Experts, said the UK recruitment problem was exacerbated by the relatively poor infrastructure of courier labor-intensive work. Unlike countries such as China and Poland, there are few lockers and parcel stores that can help ease tensions.

“Given the current state of the infrastructure, the only way to deal with large-scale growth is to take on more people,” he said. “Everyone has a peak problem. It’s a question of how big it is.”

However, Royal Mail is tinkering with routes to improve delivery efficiency. A group that separated from the post office’s retail network in 2012 said it would require less flexible workers by 13,000 after changes, including route replanning.

The company’s 505-year-old service provider, Shiona Rolf, said the company, which has a 505-year history, relies on referrals rather than bonus incentives to take on employees’ families and friends and attract workers during peak seasons. Said that.

“Being well aware of the number of employment opportunities that exist in the UK, this will be a tougher market for attracting people to businesses,” she said. “We took this opportunity to start recruiting early.”

Royal Mail has made changes, such as hiring a dedicated parcel delivery driver, but we need to go further to change the “step into the street” model.

Because the parcel arm was the main source of profit, we couldn’t rely on systems built to accommodate much smaller letters, especially as packages up to 8 feet in length increased in size.

“The biggest challenge is keeping up with the pace of change,” Rolfe said. “The key to making these changes is to bring everyone in,” she added, adding that efficiency needs to be improved without keeping workers away.