Having had the pleasurable experience of working for both organizations
my opinions and observations go like this: Fredex's business plan of "operate independently, compete collectively" is yet another smoke and mirrors concept developed by Fred and his wonderful PR dept. Nothing is integrated-employees,trackers,operations,sales,rules,employee relations. His plan may work in the short term but the ICs of ground are pissed. Promised 6 figures and netting 40k! Independent yet terminal managers are telling them how to do things, giving them "splits" that are unprofitable. I'd be mad too. Express isn't losing volume to UPS or DHL, it's losing to its cousin ground.
Integrated services? 9 years at X and saw a sales person 5 times. They make(as part of your review and raise)couriers go get the leads and no one follows up. As an x courier do you know how stupid it is to be 2 steps ahead or behind the ground driver. How stupid is it to say, No I can't take that pkg because it is ground's. Having up to 5,6,7 fedex couriers coming into your place of business per day. Yeah, it's putting your people in front of the customer but c'mon, it's express at 10;30, ground, express deliveing standatd or 2day, pick-up express, pick up ground if they get to it, misload/misroute express driver. UPS, one driver doing it all.
Fred's plan is a house of cards, smoke and mirrors formula. He's making tone of money and his stock is overvalued because of the independent contractors slaving away doing 2/3 of the deliveries. Express is his core business and he's stripping it of volume to give it to his ICs. They are unionizing and forcing to be classified as employees. Here and there, but eventually all of them will benefit from the brave ICs who stepped up and told Fred "we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore.
Wall street will catch on. Fedex will be around for a long time as will UPS. For goodness sakes, people shop like crazy via the internet,somebody has to bring it to their lazy asses front door. God forbid they go to a store and buy whatever. Read on about the morale issues the ordinary fedex employee has towards Uncle Freddy on FedExaminer.com. At every organization there are those who would die for their company, monte. It's pride in thier organization but from my perspective, UPS, in all of its conservativeness, is the more respected company. I haven't worked there in 10 years and I still bleed brown. Fedex gave me little to be proud of. You just have to learn to read between their purple haze of bs.
