LYNCHBURG, Va. – Several people living and working in the Lynchburg area are frustrated and say they are having to wait longer to get UPS deliveries.
It’s especially difficult for those like Mitch Eggleston. He depends on UPS to get the items he needs for his Appomattox business, TShirtzNow.
“Most of our business is time-oriented. We need stuff,” Eggleston says. “We need to get it in and make sure we can get it to the customer on time. In those cases, it has hurt us. It has hurt us a lot.”
About a month ago, orders started coming in slower for him and other businesses in the area like Penelope.
TShirtzNow and Penelope say they were told UPS was going to start to cut off packing loads for next-day delivery at a certain time.
“Getting things in on time and getting them out on time is very important,” Scott Small with Penelope says. “Especially with as tough as it is to get things for stores right now. To have them delay additional time makes it even more tough for us to do business.”
It’s not just business owners being impacted either. Several people in Lynchburg’s surrounding counties are dealing with the same problem.
UPS says it all has to do with technology changes at the Lynchburg Distribution Center. In a statement to 10 News, UPS says:
“We have implemented new technology at our facility in Lynchburg to accommodate customer demand and safely meet our service commitments, which is resulting in some ground deliveries arriving one day later than anticipated. We are still delivering these packages within the time requested, and we encourage our customers to use the free UPS My Choice to track their packages while they are being delivered.”
Eggleston says TShirtzNow only dealt with the problem for a week before they had to make a change to keep up with business demands.
“FedEx will still get us next day delivery from there. Whereas UPS now takes two days,” he says. “Where we have a choice now, we’re going to FedEx because it saves us a day.”
TShirtzNow was able to solve some of the problem by changing carriers. Others say their hands are tied since a lot of vendors exclusively use UPS.
“We are just trying to make the best of it. We are trying to maintain what we can do for our customers to make sure that we’re getting the right product in our stores for them,” Small says. “We are just trying to be as proactive in getting the right stuff at the right place, when we can as quickly as we can.”