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But chaos it is not. As a big reader, buying books in bookstores and online, I see UPS workers at my home office more than once a week. I could set my watch by their arrival. Unlike the post office, my driver knows where to leave what, how to contact me in case he needs to, and many other highly personalized and customized services, which few other companies of any size can match.
Our lives today would be much different without UPS, and its excellent archrival FedEx. The competition makes them both stronger. Without these guys, there would be no Amazon.com Inc. — no e-commerce. Think about what you — or the shipper — pays UPS for each package. For a few bucks, they can get it across the country in a day or two. Few organizations of any type add as much value to our economic well-being.
But perhaps most important, think about what UPS means to its employees and, through them, to the U.S. economy. Those 398,000 workers make UPS roughly tied with McDonald’s Corp. as the third-biggest employer among U.S. companies. Those employees are famously well-paid. Last I checked, driver base pay ran about $30 an hour. With overtime, your driver likely makes $80,000 to 100,000 per year. Their health benefits are fully paid for their entire family. They have generous pensions and extensive annual leave for the most senior drivers. One report indicated that the average driver has been with the company more than 16 years with turnover estimated at less than 2 percent per year.
Continuation-- My observation is that UPS people work extremely hard, long hours, and that they deserve every penny. But the company, unlike some, pays them every penny. Companies that believe they will get ahead by beating up on their employees will learn soon enough that this is not the route to lasting prosperity. UPS is not the flashiest company on Earth. Starting in Seattle in 1907 with co-founder Jim Casey, it has usually been led by what business author Jim Collins would call “Level 5” leadership — not seeking headlines or a lot of press attention. I think we should all take a few minutes to learn from this great company, to study it and to thank its people, including the driver who serves you, for what they do for our society and our economy.
In this age of Wal-Mart and trillion-dollar federal budgets, we are used to seeing giant, hard-to-grasp numbers. But UPS is a human-level business. Use science, technology and algorithms as it might, the guts of the company is still people carrying around packages, often one at a time.
I have spent much of my life in retailing, and I always think it’s hard for people to understand how difficult it is to manage geographically dispersed businesses. Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and even the big computer companies have a handful of plants and offices compared to a giant retail chain like Walgreen’s, with about 8,000 stores, each with its own manager. But UPS, with all those people in the field and 300 aircraft moving about the globe around the clock, takes complexity to another level. In the hands of most corporate executives, it would be chaos.
UPS just outsoutced 500 Texas jobs and sent it to India. They can pay those people $3.00
an hour and not give them any benefits. An American company my @ss. They spend millions
on their race horses and their race cars (that has NEVER won) yet. But they call themselves. an American company. RIGHT !!!!!!
Add in Apple's do anything to avoid paying taxes. An American company like Apple selling hit songs by American artists to American consumers from the U.S. but billed from a small office in Luxemburg that has no Corporate taxes. So no taxes paid on hundreds of millions in sales.. Doesn't sound like a company to be admired to me.
With a market capitalization of about $74 billion, this is the most valuable transportation company on Earth, beating No. 2 Union Pacific Corp. by about $20 billion. It is also the largest in earnings; last year the company generated $53.1 billion in revenue, earning a profit of $3.8 billion. Now let’s turn to the complexity of what UPS does. Its 398,300 worldwide employees, 80 percent of whom are in the U.S., delivered 4 billion packages and documents last year, or 15.8 million a day. It delivers to 7.7 million customers each day, covering more than 220 countries. Its fleet consists of more than 100,000 vehicles, largely the famous brown package cars. Its facilities include more than 2,000 shipping facilities, 40,000 drop boxes and more than 4,000 UPS stores.
Austin Business Journal by Gary Hoover, Contributing Writer
Date: Monday, June 4, 2012, 9:39am CDT
Contributing Writer- Austin Business Journal
Few things are as interesting to me as figuring out which companies are truly great, what makes them great and how they stay that way. If I asked a typical group of people, or one of my Hoover Academy classes, to name the greatest American company, the most common answer might be Apple Inc. Others would name General Electric Co., while still others might say Wal-Mart Stores Inc. I have respect for all these, but I would nominate United Parcel Service Inc. Why?
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