Rush Job
The rise of e-tailing and a Culture's heightened need for speed are driving a revolution in shipping.
It's 11:45 p.m, and while most of the East Coast watches late-night TV or sleeps, you decide your life will not be complete without a Brookstone temperature-sensing fork for tomorrow's cookout.
As recently as three years ago, the craving could only be satisfied by a visit to the mall the next day. And this, of course, would only be possible if you lived near a Brookstone store. But in these days of instant Internet gratification, the fork is just a few clicks away.
Outpost.com, for example, offers the entire Brookstone line as part of its online inventory. It also promises free next-day delivery of any item ordered before midnight.
But making good on that promise is no easy matter. If the Kent, Conn.-based company used a conventional shipping service, it would have to cut off orders no later than 7 p.m. to ensure prompt delivery. That's because, in the modern world of overnight shipping, most packages are flown from a company's warehouse to a sorting facility (often in the middle of the US) before being put on another plane bound for the customer.
But Outpost has chosen an option being used with increasing frequency. By moving its inventory to the massive Airborne Express sorting center in Wilmington, Ohio, Outpost saves half the travel time for its packages. To further speed up the process, Outpost lets Airborne handle the fulfillment process.
"The reason consumers shop online is that it's convenient," says Pamela Rucker, vice president for public relations at the National Retailer's Federation in Washington. "But it doesn't have the immediate gratification of walking into a store and buying something. The way online retailers can compensate is by getting the item into the hands of the buyer more quickly."
"The reality is, for those of us who are cash rich and time poor, midnight may be the only time we can shop," adds Ira Matathia, CEO of the Intelligence Factory, a business research unit of advertising giant Young & Rubicam. "But we're still in an environment of immediate gratifiers.
We want everything exactly the way we want it, and want it immediately.
"These days, 'instant' is probably the standard, even delivery inside of 24 hours is still an impediment to e-retailers," he says. "Clearly the shippers have to be looking at the same thing: 'How do you cut off more time?' "
E-tailers have their own set of concerns. "We were looking for three things in a shipping partner," says Outpost CEO Bob Bowman. "First, a massive focus on the customer, not just someone who was trying to move boxes. Speed and cost were the other two factors. Airborne came out on top in all three."
An order's chain reaction
In the case of our fork order, the request is first processed in Outpost's Connecticut headquarters, where it is checked for common errors, such an address or credit-card number that was input incorrectly.
But once a purchaser's credit-card number is authorized, the order is zapped electronically to Airborne.
Located about halfway between Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, and nestled in a quiet agricultural community, Airborne's facility - converted from an old US Air Force base - handles nearly 1 million packages a night.
