Our local (east side of Cleveland, Ohio) UPS shipping office has a wall map showing the entire United States, marked with the days for a package to typically get from here to there. The most remote areas, according the map, are southwest Oregon and southeast California. It takes longer to get a package there than it does even to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
No one at the UPS store knows why. What do you think?
Just a WAG, but there are no major air terminals in that area, therefore packages may have to be flown into a hub and then trucked to the final destination.
I’m guessing that they have some kind of hub in Alaska, as does Fedex, and from there to the Aleutians a package would be delivered by plane. Maybe that’s why it would be faster than ground transportation to the locations you mention from whatever center they have in California.
SE California might well mean Imperial County, which I lived in for about 1.5 years. According to Wikipedia, it’s the least populated and poorest county in California. It basically consists of three towns, each of which is under 40K people. There are no big airfields, because how many people a day would actually pay to fly in? To even get a really nice suit, you have to go to an hour east to Yuma.
Or SE California might mean the Mohave Desert, and you can readily imagine that there’s not a lot of transportation infrastructure there.
Note, also, that those maps vary by region. That is, from YOUR store that’s the most remote part of the map but from a different region some other place would be.
Yeah, this would be my guess too; a lot of cargo shipped between North America and East Asia goes through Anchorage. From Wikipedia:
Not to speak for the OP, but I suspect he understands that. I read it more as someone taking notice of the fact that there are places less distant geographically that take longer to get packages to. I, too, would wonder why somewhere just a few hundred miles from LA and Phoenix would be harder to get a package to than the freakin’ Aleutian Islands.
I also suspect that while that particular map is unique to the OP’s location, the same pockets of isolation will probably show up as longer-delivery-time patches on nearly everyone’s map.
But of course. The map is color-coded more or less concentrically (allowing for the fact that the U.S. isn’t circular), and generally speaking, shows areas closer to Cleveland having a shorter delivery time. The farther away the package’s destination, not surprisingly, the longer it takes. The only exceptions are the two areas mentioned in the OP.
If anyone wants to visit his or her local UPS shipping office and check out the maps there, I’d be interested in what you find.
Have fun.
Interesting. From my zip code, 44120, the online map shows the Oregon spot being bigger and the California spot being smaller than the wall map I recently saw. Plus there’s a “dead zone” in Idaho that didn’t appear at all on the wall map. I also notice that Puerto Rico and Hawaii are, for UPS’s purposes, at the same far remove from Cleveland. :dubious:
Anyone else try it for their zip codes?
From central NC (27517) I get six-day delivery for Hawaii, a small patch of SE California, a patch of Idaho at the Montana border, and a strip of southwestern Oregon that includes nearly half the coast and humps toward the middle of the state. Puerto Rico is in the four days delivery zone.
From Chicago, the “California dead zone” appears to be contained in the far eastern part of San Bernardino County, between Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Monument. I also get five-day delivery to the aforementioned regions in Oregon & Idaho, along with Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
What’s also interesting is that according to this information, a package from Chicago to Alaska will take four business days to arrive, but a package from Alaska to Chicago will take seven.
From San Francisco (94103), there seems to be a dead zone just north of New York City.
Outbound from Minneapolis, I get about the same map as MikeS’s Chicago map, except PR is only 4 days.
The interesting one is Inbound to Minneapolis. All of Alaska is 7 days. The northern half of California, Western half of Nevada, part of Oregon (just east of the mountains), the spot in Idaho and Hawaii are all 5 days. Why the heck is it 5 days from San Francisco to Minneapolis?
I get the same thing for a package coming from Houston.
I just checked that. Six days from SF to just north of NYC - but to nowhere else in the entire U.S., Alaska and Hawaii included - and seven to Puerto Rico! How weird.
To get to the western side of the Coastal Range from Medford, Oregon, we had to go through California to do it. We could have also driven fairly far north out of our way to get there too. I am guessing that there are not many gaps in the mountains in that area.
FWIW,
Rob
I’m guessing this is UPS ground service. For the Alaska to Chicago package, UPS probably puts the freight heading south on a barge from Anchorage to Seattle. Usually takes 3 days. Add that to the 4 days by truck from Seattle to Chicago and, voila! Seven days.
For the box going from Chicago to Alaska, I’m betting the freight is going by truck to Seattle then airplane from Seattle to Anchorage on a positioning flight (point 6 on the link). I’d imagine freighters may have more positioning flights than the passenger flights noted in that link.
I get the gray six-days for Hawaii, and small areas in SE CA, southwest Oregon and the eastern center of Idaho.
I’m in Louisville these days, which is a honkin’ major UPS hub 
. There are no six-day places - Alaska is three(!), and Medford OR, Salmon ID, non-Oahu HI, Puerto Rico, and the eastern corner of San Ber’dino County CA are five.