Just a post to state some of the weird routing I've had on my N900 making it's way to Australia.
Started off at Lake Forest, California
Headed its way to Memphis, Tennessee,
Headed back to Oakland, California
Anyone else experienced this? Your goods going half way accross the country before heading back? Oakland apparently has an international Fedex depo there, but it seems poor management to send it to another state first to get it there quicker.
Just about everything international sent via FedEx in the US gets sent though their Memphis facility for sorting overnight. In your case (Pacific destinations) final departure from the US is the Oakland, CA facility. This is all done over the course of a single night.
In their beginning it was the way FedEx could guarantee overnight delivery. In fact it was entirely possible for an over night letter sent yesterday from a couple of blocks away in Pittsburgh, PA after pick up first went to the local station, was sorted into a shipping container, trucked to the airport at 9PM, departed, arrived in Memphis at 12:30 AM, was resorted into another container, departed and arrived back at the Pittsburgh airport by 04:30 AM, was then trucked back to the station, unloaded and placed on a final delivery truck to arrive at the door step two blocks away by 10 AM that day.
This has changed as markets have grown. FedEx now has more local sorting facilities. However, international packages still depart from just a few airports.
In 1975 that was the only way to ensure that all items were scanned into the system in order to bill, allocate resources, report variances, and get something "that absolutely, positively has to get there overnight.
Code scanners were primitive, one sensor affairs that required that package labels be presented in a certain way and there were limitations on speed. Now a driver scans a package at pick-up and it's telemetry is uploaded to the system in some cases wirelessly when he drives off. By the time he reaches the local station the packages routing may be already determined by the system.
Camera recognition software has improved greatly as well as digital image processing. I have seen systems that place digital video cameras every 20 feet or so along the packages path inside a facility. All this can allow someone to determine where a package physically is in real time or provide a history that can determine where it was last "seen" by the system.
It is all pretty cool... and scary at the same time.
