April 3 (UPI) — UPS announced Monday that it will begin expanding service to include pickups and deliveries on Saturdays — a move that will ultimately provide about 6,000 new jobs in the United States.
UPS said it’s ramping up delivery to meet online shopping demand.
“The addition of another ground operations day more efficiently utilizes our existing delivery network and offers customers an even faster ground delivery solution,” UPS Chief Marketing Officer Teresa Finley said in a statement.
The decision to expand followed the company’s test of Saturday delivery in select cities last year, UPS said, and will launch in 15 more U.S. metro areas this month. The plan is to serve 4,700 cities by the holiday shopping season and nearly 6,000 in 2018.
“The time-in-transit improvement is one of the largest in the company’s 109-year-history,” UPS said in a news release. “This planned expansion is expected to create more than 6,000 new UPS jobs nationwide when operations are fully implemented.”
UPS called its Saturday delivery options “industry-leading” and said it allows the company to build on its operational capacity “with no additional investment in buildings, vehicles or trucks.”
Saturday delivery will continue this month in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia — the 2016 test markets — and begin in Indianapolis, St. Louis, Houston, Tampa, San Francisco, Cleveland, New York City, Syracuse, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Denver, Knoxville and Chicago.
