Hey, Wait A Minute Mr. FedEx Man

If you have ordered something and it is being shipped from FedEx and your are tracking it online, it can sometiems be very confusing to see the package progress.

 I am in California and sometimes I will order something from not too far away. For instance I have ordered items from less than two hours' drive away in Nevada but through FedEx tracking I will watch in amazement as my package travel all the way to Memphis, TN and then back to me. And yet somehow it will still almost always arrive right on time just as promised. It seems crazy, doesnt it?

I decided to do some research on the internet(Thank you Al Gore!) to get to the bottom of this. So here you have it - Memphis is their major hub so most often you will see your package go there before it comes to you, no matter the location of the shipper. At one point Memphis was actually the only hub they had and they still got the job done.*

You see, because of their hub in Memphis FedEx already has flights going from Memphis to everywhere. Therefore, if they add a flight from Honolulu to Memphis then your package can go anywhere. If they wanted to send the package more directly, they would have to have flights from your city to LA, and to Chicago, and to Boston and to New York...

In any given day during the normal year, they don't have enough packages to fill up all those planes.

With a hub, every destination city must have two flights - one from that city to Memphis, and one from Memphis to that city. Without a hub (or with many hubs) every city would have to have a lot of flights. Putting all the packages onto two flights is cheaper rather than spreading them out.

Why is the primary hub in Memphis instead of LA? Because it is massive in size and real estate is much cheaper in Memphis.

Below is a video from FedEx on the Memphis hub. It is pretty amazing.




*Sure we have all been frustrated a time or two that they did not leave a package we were anxious to get and had to wait until the next Tuesday or whatever. Which is a really stupid thing to get upset about. If it was that important to you then you would have paid for the next day shipping and. Not just dropping the package on our doorstep if they miss us is in our best interest. Besides if you are proactive you can do what I do and just go to their website and make arrangements ahead of time to have them leave it at a FedEx retailer and pick your package up their instead of missing the delivery.