Abstract

"The Battle for the Doorstep: The Creation of the Parcel Delivery Industry in Postwar America"

Marc Levinson, Independent Scholar (marclevinson1@gmail.com)

“The distribution of small shipments is one of the most perplexing subjects facing the transportation industry today,” Interstate Commerce Commission economists declared in 1967. The comment was accurate but remarkably ill-timed: parcel service was on the verge of an explosion that would eventually reshape commerce in the United States and around the world.
That explosion followed a twenty-year battle that reshaped the parcel delivery industry in the United States. When it began, in the aftermath of World War II, small parcels were transported mainly by the U.S. Post Office Department’s money-losing parcel post service, which faced constant complaints about the quality of its service—not least, its insistence that shippers bring outbound packages to a post office for mailing. Its main competitor for small packages was Railway Express Agency, owned by the railroads, which was eager to expand but was accustomed to delivering freight by rail for industrial customers to pick up, not trucking packages to individual homes and offices. United Parcel Service, hitherto limited to delivering customer purchases for big-city department stores, forced its way into the domestic parcel business during the 1950s and 1960s, upsetting the regulatory structure and triggering a three-way struggle for dominance.
This paper will explore the reshaping of the parcel delivery business from the 1950s to the early 1970s. It is part of a larger project examining the emergence of a global industry that delivered an estimated 161 billion parcels in 2022—an average of 300,000 every minute of every day—and underpins dramatic shifts in wholesaling, retailing, and manufacturing worldwide.