The snow in Memphis has melted after winter weather pummeled the city in mid-February, but delays from FedEx Express persist.
The Memphis-based shipping giant, whose largest and most vital shipping hub is in the city, said in a Monday service alert that the recent weather “created hazardous conditions across the U.S. and caused service disruptions that continue to affect FedEx operations.”
"FedEx is committed to providing service to the best of our ability in areas affected by the storm and as local conditions allow,” the service alert said. “We will continue to monitor the situation to minimize the impact on service.”
Why Memphis weather can affect FedEx's entire network
Many packages arrive at and depart from the FedEx Express World Hub in Memphis as part of the company's hub and spoke system.
Among the reasons FedEx chose Memphis as its headquarters in 1973 — Chairman and CEO Fred Smith founded the company in 1971 — was its central location “and because the Memphis International Airport was rarely closed due to bad weather,” according to FedEx’s company history.
In February, Memphis received 10 inches of snow from two snowstorms. It was the snowiest four-day period since 1968, before FedEx’s founding. Many of the hub’s roughly 11,000 employees couldn’t get to work, reducing the sorting power of a hub that can normally sort up to 484,000 documents and packages an hour.
The company has leaned on its Indianapolis hub, the second-largest in its network after Memphis, and regional hubs to pick up the slack. FedEx Express regional president of the Americas and executive vice president of global support Richard Smith said Feb. 22 that additional sorting shifts and volunteer work have also helped reduce some of the sizable backlog. Still, he added that it would “take probably another day, two days to really dig out from this.”
FedEx has been alerting customers since that delays are possible due to the winter weather that slammed Memphis and other parts of the country.
“We continue to make good progress on recovering from the impacts of the winter storm,” FedEx said in a statement Tuesday, adding that customers can find the latest information on weather impacts on its service alert website.
John Haber, CEO of transportation spend consultancy Spend Management Experts, said supply chains overall remain backed up from the winter storms, especially in hard-hit Texas. Adverse weather has an outsize effect on FedEx and UPS when it occurs in Memphis, home of the World Hub, or Louisville, home of the UPS Worldport hub, he added.
“UPS and FedEx both are really, really dependent on Louisville and Memphis,” he said. “Obviously, they got other air locations and facilities. They may both need to have a larger secondary backup hub to divert (volume) from a risk-management standpoint.”
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