packages

whoever distributes their packages also announces 30,000 layoffs

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Amazon faces a profound restructuring that not only affects the automation of your warehouses and the dismissal of 30,000 employees on staffthere is also removing your Amazon Go stores and has restructured its shipments. That has generated a domino effect in companies that depend on the e-commerce giant. UPS has had to adapt quickly, reducing its dependence on unprofitable packages from Amazon, which will result in 30,000 layoffs and the closure of 24 facilities throughout 2026, as he collected Reuters. The break with Amazon does not come for free. The decision has not been made overnight. In January 2025, the delivery company already announced that it was going to reduce its exposure to low-profit shipments. Among those shipments are those from Amazon, which barely left room. Carol Tomé, CEO of UPS noted that “We are in the final six months of our accelerated Amazon phase-out plan and, by all of 2026, we intend to cut another million packages per day, while continuing to reconfigure our network.” This movement reacts to Amazon’s decision to diversify your delivery peopleforcing UPS to pivot its structure towards more profitable clients such as pharmaceutical companies. The “minimis” crisis. Part of that strategic shift in shipping has been accelerated by the change of regulations in the so-called “minimis” shipments: low-value shipments from e-commerce platforms such as Shein or Temu that move millions of deliveries a day. The increase in tariff requirements has also tightened the rope that reduces shipping profitability of these platforms that use mass shipping models as Amazon does. Other companies like DHL They have already limited their shipments of this type of packages. Thousands of jobs on the line. The 30,000 layoffs planned for 2026 represent 6% of UPS’s 490,000 employees. Brian Dykes, UPS chief financial officer, clarified that the company’s priority was to avoid “hard layoffs” and the reduction of the workforce will be carried out through voluntary retirements and freezing hiring for positions that remain vacant. According what was published by The New York Timesit is not the first time that UPS has made a personnel cut of this caliber. 2025 closed with the layoff of 48,000 drivers and warehouse workers and the closure of 93 buildings. In 2024, layoffs amounted to 12,000 positions. Layoffs with benefits to avoid future losses. According to the annual balance presented by the company a few days ago, the net profit for 2025 was $5,572 million, down 3.6% compared to last year. The company’s total revenue fell 2.6% to $88,661 million. Its parcel business contracted 1.4% to $59,519 million. In its 2025 earnings presentation, the company viewed its disconnection from Amazon as a necessary step to focus on higher-profit products to drive company growth. “Looking ahead, after completing Amazon’s gradual transition, 2026 will be a turning point in the execution of our strategy to achieve growth and sustained margin expansion,” said Tomé. in his statement of income. In Xataka | Amazon closes its ERE in Spain with 920 layoffs: 791 in Barcelona and 129 in Madrid Image | Unsplash (Aaron Doucett)

Shein and Temu had taken over e-commerce in the EU. Your future is complicated for one reason: small packages

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The body that brings together the Ministers of Economy and Finance of the European Union (Ecofin) wants to put an end to the red carpet that Europe has laid out for platforms like Shein or Temu for years. The mechanism is simple: end the tariff exemption that until now has benefited packages of less than 150 euros that were imported into the old continent. Why is it important. In recent years we have seen how platforms like Temu or Shein have become absolute giants of electronic commerce. Part of that success has been based on how cheap it was for these platforms to ship their affordable products: they took advantage of a tariff exemption for packages valued at less than 150 euros, but that exemption’s days were numbered. And now he has even more of them. Deadlines want to be shortened. The initial proposal put forward by the European Commission was to eliminate this exemption in 2028. This week Ecofin took advantage of this proposal, but the executive made it clear that they have an additional objective: to advance its application two years, to 2026. Chinese companies did not stop making a fortune. 91% of all e-commerce shipments valued at less than 150 euros They came from China in 2022. Alibaba, Temu and Shein were the clear beneficiaries of an exemption that was created in the 1980s and that has gained extraordinary relevance with the rise of electronic commerce. 1.5 billion euros that the EU does not collect. According to a report that the EU commissioned from a group of experts, the union’s coffers stopped collecting 1.5 billion euros for those imports of less than 150 euros. In 2024 products entered the EU worth 4.6 billion euros through packages of less than 150 euros: double that of the previous year. Two euros for each small package. The Commission wants not only to stop this mechanism used by Chinese e-commerce platforms, but also to apply a minimum fee of two euros for these low-value packages. Eliminating the exemption in 2026 is a firm intention. This tax for the moment is an announcement that can remain just that. It will not be easy to advance the deadlines. The initial proposal is reasonable in terms of deadlines because adapting customs to this new reality is not easy. As pointed out the EU statement issued after the meeting, this new regulation “will begin to apply once the EU Customs Data Centre, the central platform proposed by the EU to interact with customs and strengthen controls, is operational, which is currently planned for 2028.” European companies could not compete. In recent years Shein, Temu or Aliexpress have grown exceptionally thanks to this regulation. According to Danish Finance Minister Stephanie Losse, this caused “unfair competition” in which European companies lost out. Tariffs from the first euro. The EU estimates that 65% of small packages entering the EU are “undervalued to avoid customs duties on imports”, something that also raises “environmental concerns, given the incentive for non-EU companies to split shipments into individual packages when sending goods to the Union.” The new regulations seek to ensure that goods entering the EU pay tariffs from the first euro. The US has already applied the story. The trade war that the US maintains with China caused the United States to already take similar measures. In February, Donald Trump issued a new executive order that also eliminated the so-called “de minimis” exception for packages valued below $800. Although there was later some relaxation Regarding the terms of that regulation, the impact on this type of commerce has been notable. Our pocket will suffer. The logical consequence of these changes is twofold: consumers will not have access to such a wide catalog on Chinese platforms, and it is also likely that the products sold on Temu or Shein will increase in price to pass on this increase in costs to users. Meanwhile, companies from the old continent such as Inditex could win by competing more favorably against these Chinese platforms. In Xataka | Shipping this $320 lens from Japan to Spain costs $29. Sending it to the US costs 2,000, and it is not a typographical error

Delivery companies in China deliver 5,400 packages per second. Your solution to master this logistics: the ‘robofurgos’

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Shenzhen’s train stations are bustling with passengers coming and going during the day, but when night falls they fill up with another type of traffic: robovans. They are small autonomous vehicles that are dedicated to delivering packages and are increasingly common in China. Robovans. If we call autonomous taxis robotaxis, it is fair to call ‘robovans’ that way. They count in Nikkei Asia These small vans have a capacity of 3 cubic meters and their maximum load is 500kg. They move slowly and emit an audible signal to avoid colliding with pedestrians. If they detect anyone closer than two meters, they stop. Its objective is to transport packages to the platforms, where operators load them onto trains and then deliver them to a logistics center. Neolix. It is the company that has deployed the most robovans to date. It is headquartered in Beijing and on your website They boast that they have already deployed 10,000 units in 300 cities, across fifteen countries. According to its president, Will Zhao, they expect the number to increase to 10 million robovans in the next ten years. Challenges. Despite Neolix’s enthusiasm, the reality is that autonomous delivery has quite a few limitations. The most notable is that the robovans are much slower than human delivery drivers. Furthermore, at the moment they are quite limited to closed spaces such as stations or airports and involve quite a high expense. According to Zhao, they hope to increase the speed as they become safer, until they reach the point where they are more effective than traditional delivery. Leaders. It makes sense that China is leading autonomous delivery because it is also a leader in online shopping. According to data from the China State Post Office, In 2024, 5,400 packages were distributed per second and the average was 100 packages per person per year. To put it in context, in 2024 in the United States the average was 66 packages per year per person. Price war. Competing in the largest online commerce market in the world causes price wars between different companies to be fierce. The market continues to grow and the volume of packages is enormous, but profit margins are very small. Some of these companies are JD Logistics, ZTO Express, SF Holding, ZTO Express and Meituan. Immediate delivery. Overnight shipping may seem fast to us, but in China it is unacceptable for most consumers. Companies are investing a lot of resources in same day deliveriessome even in just half an hour. This pressure especially affects food delivery, where there is a price war that is causing losses for companies like Meituan or JD.com and also for the restaurants themselves, who are forced to carry out very aggressive online promotions with ridiculous margins. They count on Bloombergthat there are cafes that need to send eight orders to equal the profit they would obtain from a single in-person sale. Image | Neolix In Xataka | Amazon has been stuck for years in a project that promised to revolutionize deliveries: the use of drones

Every year millions of packages are lost during shipments. So there are companies that are selling them to weight

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Only in the United States They lose or steal 1.7 million packages every day. In Spain the latest data from the TDI logistics group They revealed that more than two shipments were lost per minute. The curious thing is where at least part of them end: they are shown to weight. Millions of lost packages. According to They indicate to EFE From the employer of the logistics sector one, in Spain more than 3.3 million packages are sent per day, and the cases of loss involve a tiny fraction of 0.001% (about 3,300 per day). A simple error on the label or lack of centralized information can cause these problems, and that is where some companies recover them to resell them. Reversing weight. Services such as Crazy Day Factory, My Mystery Package, Merkandi, LotesDevolutions, or King Colis are dedicated exactly to the same thing: acquiring those lost packages to often resell them as part of surprise boxes that are sold to weight. As they point out in the confidentialin Kink Colis for example they establish a price of 1.99 euros per 100 grams in standard packages and 2.79 euros in the premium type. A lot of noise and few chollos? In King Colis FAQ, a French startup, they explain that buying this type of surprise packages can be very profitable, because one “can contradate state -of -the -art technological devices to clothing or accessories of recognized brands.” However, they also warn: “Not all lost packages necessarily contain treasures. There is a part of chance!” You don’t know what you buy. One acquires these packages to weight, but does not really know what he is buying. As they revealed in the nationalin stores such as my mystery package open ephemeral stores throughout the year in different municipalities to give out these packages, but there is a key requirement: the package cannot be opened until after buying it. And that implies risks. These lost packages are not checked and therefore can be damaged, be defective or have a much lower price than the buyer ends up. In Lotes Devolutions they explain that those products that put on sale – which are returns, not lost shipments – do not go through a previous check, which can end up causing a disappointing surprise effect. Packages are sold repaired without visible brands to eliminate commercial references, turning the purchase into a riddle … or a bet. The psychology of surprise. The surprise boxes such as those offered by all these businesses take advantage of known phenomena of human psychology. Several researchers published in June 2024 A study in which they revealed how the stimulus-organism-response (Sor) causes that impulsive purchase out of curiosity without intervening conscious thinking. We think quickly instead of thinking fast, as the Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman in his famous’ stood out in depth.Think quickly, think slowly‘. Previous experience. In Xataka we were able to meet this type of business last year, when we went to an old warehouse on the outskirts of Madrid to try to locate some cholt between the chaos of Amazon returned products that a company put on sale. There was no surprise effect here and the proposal is something different, but the conclusion was already clear: we had no luck and after hours of search we went out empty. Finding chollos, whether by surprise or not, is not easy. Image | Chuttersnap In Xataka | The end of free online returns: Zara, Pull and Bear and more stores begin to collect them

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