Sent Items #181: Monday, March 17, 2025 [🇮🇪☘️HAPPY ST. PADDY'S DAY 🇮🇪☘️]

17 days into Dry March. By now I’ve tried just about every brand of NA Beer, in part, thanks to NA Beer Club (also a brand that found their 3PL using Third Person). My favorite so far are Best Day Brewing’s Galaxy Ripple (a take on an Imperial IPA) and Guinness 0 (particularly timely given it’s St Paddy’s Day!)

My biggest challenge is ahead with March Madness beginning this week. Speaking of which, I’ve created this group on Yahoo! Sports (link) where you can join others in e-commerce logistics for some healthy competition! I’ll be posting updates on LinkedIn Sign up here and complete your bracket before the games begin this Thursday March 20.

A couple more unboxing videos released in the last week. Many more to come. Follow Third Person on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to stay up to date.

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How Walmart Built the Biggest Threat Amazon Has Faced (WSJ)

With thousands of stores, and an army of drivers, the giant retailer can make same-day deliveries to more than 90% of the country. Walmart delivered five billion items on the same day they were ordered last year, double the number delivered in 2023. It can now deliver most of the 120,000 products in its sprawling supercenters, including meat, eggs and milk, to 93% of U.S. households the same day, sometimes in hours.

About 41% of all U.S. e-commerce sales go through Amazon, a much bigger share than Walmart’s 9%. Amazon could overtake Walmart this year as the country’s largest company by revenue if sales trends persist. Walmart reported $681 billion revenue in 2024; Amazon’s was $638 billion.

Over the past decade, Walmart executives realized they needed to use their grocery business to fend off Amazon’s expansion. Walmart gets more than 50% of its U.S. revenue from selling meat, eggs, lettuce and other groceries. It has used its scale to drive down prices for those items, which draw shoppers for regular trips. That setup works when shoppers also pick up higher-margin items in the part of the store insiders call “the other side of the box”: clothing, home decor or small appliances. Walmart executives hoped a version of the same system could work online—use groceries to lure online business away from competitors, then make money on bigger, more profitable purchases.

Walmart’s same-day delivery coverage has stretched from about 76% of U.S. households two years ago to 93% today.

The transition to online delivery has been rough and expensive. Walmart paid $3.3 billion in 2016 for Jet.com, an online seller of groceries and other items, which it later shut down. It invested heavily to build a personal-shopping and fast delivery service for wealthy New Yorkers, only to shut it down two years later. Walmart still uses drivers from other companies such as Roadie and Uber Eats in some areas to meet demand, but more than 80% of deliveries come from its Spark network.

Amazon continues to expand rapidly. In addition to over 1,000 shipping facilities around the U.S., it owns Whole Foods grocery stores, and more than 200 million people globally subscribe to its Prime membership. The similar Walmart+ offers free delivery for orders over $35.

Alternative delivery providers ramp up service coverage (Supply Chain Dive)

Jitsu, SpeedX and Veho have unveiled new regional launches this year in a continued push for volume and market share. Since February, Jitsu, SpeedX and Veho have announced new markets they are making deliveries in, or will soon. These companies join competitors like UniUni in bolstering their domestic networks to fuel volume growth and improve their value versus industry titans like FedEx and UPS.

• Jitsu is launching in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Columbus, Ohio, next month, targeting doubling its 2024 volumes by year-end.

• SpeedX has added 2,000+ ZIP codes across states like Texas and Florida, aiming for 700,000 daily packages by peak season, up from the current 250,000.

• Veho launched in Louisville (10,000 parcels/week) and Richmond (5,000/week) this February, with coverage now in 44 markets.

• UniUni plans to cover 70% of the U.S. population by end of the year, adding states like Minnesota, Michigan, and Idaho.

The small parcel delivery landscape is getting very interesting as these alternative providers expand coverage and capacity. I believe each of these carriers use a similar, if not identical, 1099 (i.e. “gig”) model, while competing for the same pool of labor (drivers) and customers. I suspect not each of Jitsu, SpeedX, UniUni and Veho will be here at the end of 2026. Those who are quickest to market (sic: investment) will have staying power.

This is all developing as Trump is pushing to privatize the USPS and reduce its $9.5 billion loss in 2024 alone ($100 billion since 2007!). Interestingly, the USPS struck a deal with Elon Musk's DOGE team for reform help (link).

Full privatization could raise costs sharply and cut many jobs, threatening fairness and access. To be clear, the US Postal Service is an independent government agency with 635,000 employees, and has been exempt from DOGE-directed federal employee reductions. Postmaster General (i.e. CEO) DeJoy told Congress that the USPS plans to reduce its workforce by 10,000 workers in the next month through a voluntary early retirement program first announced in January. The Post Office has cut 30,000 jobs since 2021.

DeJoy has also said the Postal Regulatory Commission "is an unnecessary agency that has inflicted over $50 billion in damage to the Postal Service by administering defective pricing models and decades-old bureaucratic processes." I suspect the PRC will not be fired, and post office locations will not be closing.

It wouldn’t be a fair issue of Sent Items without a post on TARIFFS. So here we go:

I came across this tweet from Michael Patron:

See, Michael used to sell a memory foam seat cushion similar to what you see above. First thing he did was find polyurethane factories in the U.S. He called and emailed all 13 that he found. He had 1 get back to him with an MOQ of 5,000 units. The factory can pour the foam but they still need to import the fabric, zipper and packaging from China. This changes the lead time to about 150 days instead of the typical 70ish from China.

The U.S. factory can't provide any samples, their lead time is longer, their MOQ is higher, service is worse and all of this to have a price that is 300-400% more. And this is one of the more simple products to manufacture. Bottom line: customers would not be willing to spend $20-$30 more for this simple product.

It seems like the only guy to “successfully” manufacture in the U.S. is actually, a grifter. Successful because he doesn’t pay his bills.

Finally, check out this article I was featured in by ModernRetail: How trade wars are complicating the search for the right 3PL (ModernRetail).

Have a great week!

- Matt

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