Fedex Ground trucking center kicks into high gear as Christmas nears

hey launched into hyper Santa Claus package-delivery mode early Monday, this beefed-up crew of 115 FedEx employees arriving

at the cavernous Henderson warehouse at 3 a.m. to unload, scan, sort and deliver a record daily number of boxes as part of the company’s most frenetic package-shipping day of the year.

FedEx Ground’s trucking center off an industrial side-road called Courier Street usually picks up and delivers 50,000 packages from the Las Vegas Valley to Death Valley to Mesquite, but on Monday that Las Vegas area number was projected to jump to 80,000 as the holiday gift season kicks into high gear two weeks before Christmas. In all, FedEx was expected to move 19 million packages Monday, up from its previous record of 17.2 million.

“It’s like our Super Bowl today,” said Ken Barnes, FedEx senior manager for the Henderson warehouse. “We’ve been preparing for this all year. It’s exciting to see this unfold.”

At 5:30 a.m., FedEx workers were functioning like a well-oiled machine, moving 9,000 packages an hour. They unloaded boxes from 18-wheelers parked at 11 bays, placed them on two miles of 20-foot-high conveyor belts and sorted them into six lines of FedEx trucks arranged by ZIP code on the other half of the 150,000-squarefoot building. Extra relief trucks were

parked next to other trucks to handle the overflow of packages on a particular route.

At each point of contact, the package was documented by workers with scanning devices attached to their wrists so that customers could track the footprint of every item. A few hours later, a fleet of 180 trucks — normally 140 — began pulling out for stops along the Strip, Henderson, Summerlin and all points across the valley. Drivers were expected to have barren shelves in their trucks by 3 p.m. and spend the next four hours picking up packages.

“We got them on the road early,” Barnes said. “We’re ahead of schedule today.”

The record-breaking delivery day is fueled by online shopping, which caused a giant spike in the share of packages bound for homes. On Monday, 40 percent to 50 percent of the deliveries have the “H” printed on the FedEx code stickers and are bound for residential destinations, Barnes said. The number is usually 25 percent, he said.

The average cost for a package moving through the plant is $8.50, ranging from $3 to $100 for the items that range from wine and cheese gift baskets to television stands to car tires.

The smooth operations are no accident. Barnes held a pep rally and strategy session several days earlier as employees sat on metal bleachers and watched a PowerPoint on a giant TV monitor. The game plan was to prep early to move packages ahead of schedule. For example, 20 percent of the packages designated to be delivered in the Las Vegas Valley on Monday were already dropped off on Saturday, Barnes said.

“We’ve studied the shopping habits and trends. Two weeks ago you could see all the stars lining up,” he said.

Moving the extra cardboard meant hiring more manpower across the country. FedEx is expected to pick up and deliver 280 million packages from Thanksgiving to Christmas, a 13 percent increase from 2011.

“We hired 20,000 extra seasonal workers. We braced for this and worked longer hours,” said Ben Hunt, a spokesman at Memphis, Tenn.-based FedEx. “We have all hands on deck and we’re going to get it done.”