FedEx's Ground service will stop making Sunday deliveries to about 15% of the US homes it's currently serving, largely in rural areas.
The change will take place Sunday, August 21, FedEx announced Friday.
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During the pandemic the company had expanded Sunday service to 95% of US homes, a response to "the exponential growth of e-commerce," FedEx said in a statement. But "as economic conditions have shifted," it's scaling the service back to 80% of homes.
FedEx Ground handles the majority of the company's online purchase shipments business, but it's a crowded field with competition from Amazon's own in-house delivery service, the US Postal Service and UPS.
Even before Friday's announcement, FedEx Ground had already been trimming some of the lower-priced, less time-sensitive "economy" shipments to homes.
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Despite the challenges for that line of business and a drop in the number of shipments at FedEx Ground, the unit's sales were up in the most recent quarter - thanks largely to charging shippers an additional fee for fuel. Most other trucking companies have also introduced fuel surcharges because of record-high diesel costs, CNN reported.
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