Santa had some serious help in the District Monday morning in the form of 200 FedEx Express employees who showed up early to brace for what was projected to be the heaviest shipping day of the year.
“We started at 5 a.m. today — normally, on a Monday, we start at about 6:10, and 7 on other days” said Prentiss Gates, a FedEx carrier and facility coordinator, as packages from Toshiba, L.L. Bean and Victoria’s Secret floated past him on conveyor belts.
Behind him, 20 workers were furiously unloading trucks that carried an estimated 20,000 packages bound for District homes and offices — about 3,000 more than on an average day. The increase in the city is less than elsewhere because as personal shipping rises for the holidays, business mailings fall.
Worldwide, FedEx Express and FedEx Ground were expected to handle 11.3 million packages Monday, up from 7 million on an average day, the company said.
In the District, the packages are separated by ZIP code and carried via conveyor belt to one of five delivery-truck loading areas, where they are further sorted by street.
The Connecticut Avenue and Georgetown areas — the two busiest for FedEx during the holiday season — will borrow sorters from the K Street and Capitol Hill lines this week, Gates said.
The District poses two particular challenges to FedEx: The abundance of multiunit residential buildings where nobody is home to accept the delivery, and the peculiar tendency for federal buildings to get their own ZIP codes.
The unfortunate packages with mistyped or missing ZIP codes end up in the “mis-sort” line, where employees who are, by now, experts when it comes to D.C. addresses, frantically try to get them to the correct truck before it leaves.
“The ZIP code is the most important thing,” Gates said. “Without the ZIP code, your package is in la-la land. We’ve had diamond jewelry, engagement rings, all with wrong addresses.”
Gates, who has worked for FedEx for 28 years, has two tips for holiday shippers: Find out when the recipient is going to be home, because carriers can’t leave packages outside of apartment buildings, and make sure you have the right ZIP code.
Monday afternoon wasn’t going to be any slower for the facility.
“Six!” shouted another facility coordinator toward the end of the shift. “That’s what time we have to be here tomorrow morning,” Gates said grinning.
