When the Seattle newspaper strike was late last year and into this one, I felt weird about the whole issue, as my Mac column for the Seattle Times was more like something I did for my editor that happened to appear in print. I don't mean to sound woo-woo about it, but unless your job involves meeting tens of thousands of people or speaking in public, the impact of your work can appear quite virtual. They accomplish this by having a warehouse on the airfield at Airborne's Ohio operations center.
Stuff goes out one conveyor belt and onto the plane, practically.
This keeps their costs low, and they must have an amazing sweetheart deal with Airborne Express. The company's CEO at the time, in a sentiment echoed by the new CEO in an interview in today's Wall St. Journal, said that they found their average order size was quite high, and that giving up shipping was a huge offset against advertising and marketing costs. That is, the reliability of their pricing became such a watchword for their customers, that they discontinued virtually all other promotion and marketing. The CEO, in the WSJ interview, says pretty simply that people who order cheap stuff from them don't turn into good customers, so there's no reason to subsidize the cheap stuff. Or perhaps they're each other's evil twins.