If FedEx Is Hiring 70,000 Workers, Then E-Commerce Will Rule the Holidays?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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If FedEx Is Hiring 70,000 Workers, Then E-Commerce Will Rule the Holidays?

© Thomas R Machnitzki / Wikimedia Commons

A day after Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) said it would hire 100,000 full-time and part-time workers in the United States and Canada, FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX) said it would add 70,000 workers. One of the world’s largest shipping companies said holiday demand triggered the plans. Additionally, the only reason that FedEx would need the army of people is if e-commerce is expected to surge during the period. Brick-and-mortar customers usually take their own packages home.

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FedEx said most of the workers would be part of its FedEx Ground network. These are the people who drive trucks and deliver door to door.

Since Amazon and FedEx broke up last year, the shipping company will need to rely on other e-commerce traffic. FedEx says Amazon is just a little more than 1% of its business. Other e-commerce clients are the customers who will need the new FedEx workers, and thus drive the FedEx worker additions. Amazon may be the world’s largest online shopping center, but the sector is made up of tens of thousands of other retailers, if not more.

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In many ways, the health of e-commerce is based outside Amazon’s success. Although Amazon brings in billions of dollars from holiday sales, if it were stealing most of these sales from other e-commerce companies, online sellers would be so troubled that FedEx’s delivery traffic likely would be down. On the contrary, FedEx may have one of the better holidays in its history.

The FedEx news is another blow to in-store shopping. People who drive to stores generally take what they have bought with them. Online shoppers can’t.

FedEx’s announcement means people will be home for the holidays, on personal computers, tablets and smartphones.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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