Severe winter weather cut third-quarter profits at courier delivery services firm FedEx Corp., but packaging took a kick in the pants as well. That kick was delivered by FedEx Corp. Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Fred Smith, who was quoted in a March 19 online Wall Street Journal story, “FedEx Takes Sloppy E-Tailers to Task.”
"No one wants to order something over the Internet, get it three days before Christmas and it is smashed or the label comes off it and the package goes into the ether," Smith said in the article.
In Bloomberg.com’s article, “FedEx Cuts 2014 Forecasts on Storms as CEO Scolds Retail,” Smith was quoted as saying, “It is a big part of the e-commerce business that really didn’t get enough publicity last year because they were an integral part of the problems even more than the weather and the carrier performance.” The Bloomberg story noted, “FedEx ‘kept getting pinged with the big problem in e-commerce,’ Smith said on a conference call with analysts yesterday. Boxes weren’t packed well, labels weren’t properly affixed, and sometimes retailers claimed packages had been shipped to FedEx or UPS when in fact they hadn’t, he said.”
