Courier and Delivery Driver Employment Fall; Warehouse Employment Up

Post the holiday e-commerce surge, the inevitable arrived.  According to the Wall Street Journal, courier and delivery jobs were shed quickly by companies with lower demand.

Warehouse employment continues to outpace the overall economy.  Just go to towns like Lakeland, FL, Memphis, TN or Nashville and you can see that for mile upon miles.

What is fascinating about all this is this means buffer inventory is increasing. The graph below shows the incredible climb of inventory relative to sales in our economy.  Wasn't this what all this fancy supply chain software was supposed to solve?

Inventory to Sales Ratio

We are back to roughly 2002 levels which, if you measure supply chain efficiency by inventory levels you could say that we are in a "lost decade" of supply chain improvement.