which is kinda funny because they have the contract for a lot of the postal air freight. They’re essentially giving it to the USPS who then flies it on a Fed Ex plane to the Postal sort facility in IND and then back out.
You could ship via UPS who gives it to USPS who flies it on Fed Ex who bumps it to DHL who moves it on NorthWest for pickup and delivery by UPS at destination.
Each shipment company has a version of this. With Federal Express, it’s called FedEx Home Delivery. It’s a special service that lets the shipper ship the product to you for a very small amount. Note, that doesn’t mean that they will therefore charge you less, it just means they get a break. Fortunately, most online services pass this deal on to you.
Whenever a shipper prepares to ship a package to their customer, they choose a shipper and a shipment method based on certain criteria, the largest factor being what is going to cost them the least money. The second biggest factor is the expected delivery location. If the place you’re ordering it from gives you an option to specify the shipping address as Home or Business, that tells them whether or not to use Home Delivery service or Business.
A Business class delivery service (what most people are used to at their places of business) delivers M-F during business hours, and charges extra for a Saturday delivery.
A Home class services works on the assumption that you will be at home, and not at work, to receive the shipment, and therefore delivers things differently. UPS, FedEx, and DHL all have versions of this.
One version allows them to dump everything on a local shipper, usually USPS. This greatly reduces their delivery cost - 1 delivery of 100 items is easier than 100 deliveries of 1 item each. Keep in mind most home orders will be 1 or 2 items, and work orders might be several, so delivering two books in a single box from Amazon.com is not always cost effective for UPS or FedEx.
If they can drop them all at USPS, their cost for those deliveries probably went to 10% or less. The cost for USPS to make deliveries of one or two packages per location, to places they are already delivering to, probably does not increase their cost as radically as it reduces the cost on the shipper who brought it to USPS. So that shipper pays USPS a small fraction of what their cost would have been to deliver themselves.
Another flavor of home delivery service has the shipper delivering Tues-Sat instead of Mon-Fri, and generally those hours are 10-6 instead of 8-5. They also tend to take a day or two longer than business class service to arrive, although this is not always the case.
The end result should be a cost saving for us, the customers. A recent shipment I got from Sony was free shipping, with the drawback that I had to wait over a weekend (until Tuesday) to get it. Would I have paid an extra $3 to get it before the weekend? Sure. Would I have paid an extra $15 or $20? No way.
And if it’s going to Canada, it can then sit in a sort facility for several days before it’s moved to a customs office and inspected, then it can sit in another sort facility before going through Canada Post to the destination.
My company ships packages to Canada customers often, and it takes them about 2 weeks longer to get things than customer 20 miles south of them but still in America. We could pay for expedited shipping, but it’s horrendously expensive already, and massively more expensive to expedite it, and none of our customers want to pay the extra.
Yah, after 9/11 you could spend anywhere from 1 hr to 8 hrs at the border waiting to clear. when I was dealing with trucks you could tell the threat level by the length of delay.
Many of you are missing a key point to the OP.
Phoenix is about 6 hrs by car on I10 from El Monte, CA
Salt Lake City is on I15
They could have taken less time and gone the right direction if they took it to Las Vegas . . . so why did they go to Phoenix? 
Freight routes do not necessarily have the same loads in each direction. A route that is symmetrical will have an aircraft matched to it based on the heaviest leg. Therefore, the reciprocal route will have open space. Add to that the fact that West Coast cities moving 2nd day freight will have to fly that freight to a sorting hub on a day flight (trucks won’t connect the East Coast). If it’s 2nd day freight picked up in LAX then it is within trucking distance of West Coast cities served by day flights so some of that freight automatically goes to a supporting city based on flight loads.
If I’m confusing anybody by the term day flight then understand next-day service moves overnight. A day flight is a separate operation that often consists of re-using the night flight on a 2nd round trip to a sorting hub.
Incidentally, I had a DHL package from Amazon delivered today. The delivery guy looked like some random dude who they pulled in off the street to deliver stuff. Don’t they have uniforms? And he had a tiny little van.
The general answer is, using the most efficient path for one package to get from point A to point B is not necessarily the most efficient way to run a shipping network. DHL could drive each package individually from the posting location to its destination–and they could charge $0.50 per mile (based on current fuel and payroll costs) to do it, and go out of business because they’d be drastically overpriced compared to more efficient competitors.
The basic method is to use distribution hubs to handle large masses of packages. How many levels of hubs you have, and how large an area each hub services, to get maximum efficiency, is a complicated mathematical problem that the companies all have had very smart people and very big computers working on. 
But the weirdness happens at all levels–and has to, if you think about it. For example, the Bardin Road post office is my local USPS distribution hub servicing my corner of Arlington, TX. If I put a letter in my mailbox for my neighbor three blocks down, the mail carrier will pick it up from my mailbox, drive it past my neighbor’s house and another mile and a half to the Bardin Road post office, where it will go through an automated sorting machine and get plopped back into my mail carrier’s bag the next morning. Then my mail carrier will drive past my house with it before arriving at my neighbor’s to deliver it.
It sounds a bit goofy when put that way; but compared to having the mail carrier look over each address of mail she picks up to see if it goes to another house on her route, it’s actually more efficient. Very little of the mail she picks up is actually for houses on her route, so whatever time she saves by skipping the post office on that one letter would be massively outweighed by the time cost in reading all of those address of the many letters she picks up each day. Her route would have to be a lot shorter to give her the time to do that, so the USPS would need to hire a lot more mail carriers in order to handle the same volume of mail.
The same sort of situation applies to the package going from El Monte to Salt Lake via Phoenix, although there’s no way to say exactly how and why without a lot more information about DHL’s distribution network. Suffice to say, it’s not cost efficient to send packages that far in small batches–if you build your network correctly, you can save on transportation and handling costs, even if every individual package ends up traveling considerably farther than the straight-line route from its origin to its destination.
In the spirit of GQ, I must point out this as being 100% false. Nothing is ever ‘handed to USPS’ by FedEx outside of the aforementioned service . (overview of the FedEx service version here) Rather, FedEx hauls a large amount of USPS mail on any given day.
OTOH, in a small town like mine, you might have an experience like I did the last time I went to the post office window to get some stamps. The clerk said, “Betty P. just dropped off a package mailed to you. I’ll go in back and get it so you don’t have to wait for tomorrow’s carrier delivery.” And she did.
DHL uses subcontractors for some work.
I saw a guy on the local Craigslist trying to unload a minivan painted DHL yellow that he’d just retired from service. Thing had just under 250K on it. He mentioned it had been used for his DHL job.
Hee.
Wrong. UPS and DHL both deliver to my p.o. across the street from my house. I have received mailorder clothes and books that they delivered to the post office the clerk at which then placed the item notices in my box for me to pick up at the counter. I see their vans at the P.O. door pretty often. I’ll ask the clerk about the process next time I think of it.
As for the OP, Damaged, Hurled, and/or Lost.
“Jiffy Express” - when it had to be there yesterday, they’ll back-date packages and simulate shipping delays. SNL.
Closed this old thread as minor spam bait.