The shipping and delivery market is not doing well right now. Companies are facing bigger losses and have to do something about it because they simply cannot lay off any more people.

So now, these companies are going to start raising rates and it’s going to begin with the world’s biggest shipper: UPS.

In 2010, the company has announced that it plans to hike rates an average of almost 5% for ground packages and nearly 7% for air packages. If you thought shipping something “express” was expensive before…it just got even worse.

UPS isn’t the only company to step forward and say that it plans on increasing rates, FedEx has also said that it plans on raising rates by an average of 6% starting in January. However, FedEx didn’t give specifics because it raises rates every year by about 6%.

The only company that has said that it won’t be raising rates so far is the USPS which is odd considering how many billions of dollars it has lost in the past year. Regardless, it has announced that the price of a stamp won’t be going up.

This means that if you want to ship something, it will obviously start to cost you more. At an increase of 7%, the shipping increase is now more expensive than tax in my state. I agree that companies should raise their rates, however. It isn’t like no one knew that they would be raising rates.

At one point, online shopping was cheap because not only were items less expensive than in brick and mortar stores, but because many stores didn’t charge tax and shipping was relatively inexpensive, it was just simple to shop online. There are now stores that have decided to begin charging tax on items and shipping has gotten outrageous. On small items, a $10 shipping charge is a bit much. Recently I purchased a few makeup items and the shipping was actually more expensive than the order!

UPS has announced that it believes that it will have to deliver nearly 22 million packages on December 21st – it’s busiest day of the year this year. This represents a 40% increase over normal daily volume.

It also announced that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it expects to deliver around 400 million packages in the United States and abroad. The increase in shipping over the holiday season also leads to more employment. UPS is expecting to hire 50,000 seasonal workers starting soon to help handle the extra holiday volume.

The media watches these expectations from UPS as well as FedEx as a measure of how well the retail sector of the economy is doing.

If you are expecting to wait until the last minute to ship something, you can ship something by air with UPS on December 23rd and it will still get there by Christmas Eve.

FedEx has said that it expects December 14th to be its busiest day of the year and that it will ship 13 million packages on that day. FedEx does, however, have a partnership with the United States Postal Service, where FedEx ships to the post office and the postal worker delivers the package to the buyer.

If you were going to ship with FedEx, if you want your package there by Christmas, you have to ship it by Dec. 17th for ground service and December 23rd for Express service.

Of course, you can also ship with the USPS. I am unsure if it has guaranteed delivery for anything other than its overnight packages however. I do know that Priority Mail is supposed to be 2-3 day delivery and I haven’t been disappointed so far in that service.

Even if the proposed venture would have gone through, it would have been a 10 year deal where UPS would transport DHL freight between airports, not actually delivering packages to DHL customers.

DHL will continue to use ABX Air and ASTAR Cargo as its air service providers since DHL is accepting packages at locations to ship outside the U.S.

Those who have depended on DHL for years have been choosing between UPS, the USPS and/or FedEx as their delivery service.

FedEx should be grounding several of its fleet. The company is losing money every quarter, with the last quarter being particularly harsh.

It has also been talking about laying off a lot of its staff at its Memphis hub.

The pilots, 54-year-old pilot Kevin Kylemosley and 49-year-old copilot, Anthony Stephen-Pino were flying into Tokyo from Guangzhou, China when their aircraft skipped along the longer of two runways at the Narita Airport in Tokyo.

The flight ended with the plane upside down and on fire.

Again, I’m sitting in a very condensed 2-week intersession class about advertising and promotion. The very first day of class, my professor talked about FedEx cutting the ad from the Superbowl. She asked the class what we thought about FedEx since it decided to back out. The answer was simply, “it is weak.”

We also talked about how companies cut their marketing budgets during an economic downturn. Usually advertising is one of the first things to go, but if when they stop advertising, consumers see them as weak…perhaps cuts should come from somewhere else first.

It’s been raining here for several days straight. This means, if you’re a delivery person, you probably shouldn’t leave anything on the ground.

So, this package needed a signature to be delivered. This was the first problem. It was left at the front door, no one signed for it. I know there is something, somewhere that says they can’t do that.

The second problem is that it was still raining at the time of delivery and the whole area was under a flood watch…and I promise you, the front door, while it may be covered has it’s own flooding problem.

Luckily, it was picked up off the front porch not long after it was dumped.

I had a similar situation happen to me with FedEx and my netbook. I was told that it was required for delivery, this was the same day that Chris and I were going to leave for New Orleans. Luckily, we stayed a couple of hours to wait for the truck. When he came, he just handed it over to me without me having to sign for anything…scary.