“Deliver the letter, the sooner the better,” crooned the Marvelettes, the Beatles, and the Carpenters
in the hit song “Please Mr. Postman,” capturing
the familiar sentiment of not receiving a letter quickly enough. But today, with email largely replacing snail mail and more of our shopping done online, parcels have overtaken letters as generators of revenue—and will soon overtake them in volume.
When we last wrote on this topic, in 2019, we projected that the rise of e-commerce would lead to a corresponding surge in demand for parcel (or, interchangeably, package) logistics. We also argued that the trend gave beleaguered legacy postal carriers an opportunity to pivot from mail delivery to package delivery if they could…
