Sent Items #207: Sunday, October 19, 2025

Been a couple weeks so plenty to chat about. Apologies for missing last week but I was away in Italy. Even the writer of Sent Items must take a break at times! But rest assured, logistics was still on my mind in Italy - here’s a pic of the Vatican Post Office:

I’m not a huge pizza guy - my almost 40 year old body thanks me - but ‘when in Rome’ one must indulge. I can unconditionally say the best pizza in the world is New York City. Then Rome. Then nowhere else worth eating. Here’s the one we scored highest at 8.7:

Finally, you all know what this is. Very cool standing inside millennia of history:

But now I’m back at full steam ahead for the final couple months of the year. This week I’ll be on a couple different webinars:

Tomorrow (on Monday) I’ll be sitting down with Or Azulay, Co-Founder & CPO at Prysmic AI to talk about all things ops and e-comm. You can register here. This is a Twitter Space (my first time!) and will start at 2pm EST.

Then on Wednesday I will be hosting a live webinar with Shauna Bowen, Chief Digital and Transformation Officer at Radial, and Kyle Bertin, co-founder and CEO of Two Boxes. We will dig into the findings from Radial & Two Boxes' latest industry report - featuring responses from hundreds of merchants about their pain points with returns and the solutions they're looking for. You can register here.

For those who missed this month’s MATT’S CHATS, you can watch the replay here:

Additional U.S. Tariff Costs Exceed $100 Billion (Marketplace Pulse). Additional tariffs imposed by the Trump administration caused U.S. customs revenue to surge to $215.24 billion in fiscal year 2025, an increase of nearly $120 billion compared to 2024 and almost $100 billion higher than the 2022 peak of $117.49 billion. The burden is disproportionately falling on domestic retailers while foreign competitors exploit what Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen describes as “massive” customs fraud. Here’s the original interview (link).

FedEx, Amazon slated for 2025 holiday volume gains: ShipMatrix (SupplyChainDive). Deliveries are projected to jump 5% from last year’s peak season, although UPS and the Postal Service volumes are expected to stay flat. The estimated 2.3 billion packages during the upcoming holidays would be the largest amount delivered since 2022. ShipMatrix expects FedEx and Amazon to see a 5% to 8% increase in volume from the previous peak season, while UPS and the U.S. Postal Service deliveries are expected to remain flat.

🤯 🤯 🤯 

Retailers estimate that 15.8% of their annual sales will be returned this year, totaling $849.9 billion, according to the 2025 NRF Retail Returns Landscape report.

According to the report, an estimated 19.3% of online sales will be returned in 2025.

We’ll be digging into this and more on Wednesday’s Webinar (link).

Prologis Raises Outlook as Warehouse Leasing Picks Up (WSJ). The world’s largest owner of industrial real estate says companies are ramping up their warehouse-leasing decisions after three years of slow demand. The average warehouse vacancy rate across the U.S. remained flat at an 11-year high of 7.1% in the third quarter, the first period in three years that availability didn’t expand.

Finally, an interesting 60 Minutes piece of how thieves stole 24,000 bottles of Guy Fieri's tequila in a highway heist (link).

Have a great week!

- Matt

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