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Chain by the Numbers |
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- Dec. 13, 2019 -
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FedEx Drives a Long Way for Hub Workers; IMO Sulfur Mandate have Impact already on Container Carriers; eCommerce Losing Some Luster in CPG; Successful Long-Distance Autonomous Truck Test |
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200 |
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That's about how many FedEx workers take a two-hour bus ride nightly from Cleveland, Mississippi to the company's major sortation hub in Memphis, and then back again, for a four-hour round trip. That according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. The deal is this: FedEx is struggling to find enough workers in low unemployment rate Memphis, while jobs are less plentiful and come at lower wages in more rural areas such as Cleveland. So FedEx provides the transportation, and the workers endure the awful commute. The FedEx busing program runs year-round and is nearing its first anniversary. When FedEx initially held a job fair in Cleveland for Memphis jobs, it expected maybe a few dozen people. 500 showed up. But most of those candidates didn't have cars or couldn't afford to drive themselves – so the FedEx bus program was born. And the workers come, despite pay of not much over $13 per hour. "If the jobs are not coming to the Mississippi Delta, then we have to take the people to the jobs," a FedEx HR manager says.
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That is what consumer products giant Unilever paid in 2016 for then fast-growing Dollar Shave Club, the on-line razor subscription service. Now more than three years later, the business still isn't making money. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a number of consumer packaged goods companies, are falling a bit out of love with ecommerce's potential and putting renewed focus on physical stores. "There are many, many launches that grow fast, and people call them successes because they grow fast," says Procter & Gamble CEO David Taylor."We're in the world of having to create value, not just grow. A business model that makes money is a higher challenge." Dozens of on-line consumer-products startups are finding their success depends on getting on shelves of Walmart, Target, Kroger's and more. The subscription model in CPG products seems to be especially under assault. Unilever, for example, has concluded that selling staple goods through on-line subscriptions doesn't make financial sense. Similarly, P&G tested on-line subscriptions on a number of products, most prominently with Tide laundry pods. But consumers never bought in, and P&G recently scrapped that effort, as brick and mortar retails actually wins a round.
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2800 |
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That's how many miles an autonomous truck recently travelled in a successful test by food maker Land O'Lakes, according to news reports this week. The route went hub-to-hub trip from Tulare, California, to Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The trip was completed in less than three days, hauling a fully-loaded refrigerated trailer of perishable cargo. The truck was equipped with technology from a company called Plus.ai, and included advanced autonomous driving system, which uses multimodal sensor fusion, deep learning visual algorithms, and simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) technologies. The press release said the truck drove primarily in autonomous mode across interstate 15 and interstate 70, passing through varied terrains and weather conditions. A safety driver was onboard at all times to monitor and assume control if needed, and a safety engineer was present to monitor system operations. The trip included rainy and snowy roads heading east. Maybe we will see autonmous trucks someday.
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