Shipping carriers and retailers alike worked very hard to make sure that this Christmas wasn’t a repeat of the shipping-delay disaster that was Christmas 2013. While the lack of blizzards was helpful, their investments paid off: early reports show that most packages reached their destinations on time.

The Wall Street Journal reports that you might have seen FedEx trucks out delivering in your neighborhood on Christmas Day, as they did last year. That wasn’t due to delays, but the huge volume of deliveries that FedEx had to make, the company says. UPS didn’t send any of their workers out to play Santa on Christmas Day.

That 98% figure comes from Shipmatrix, a company that provides package-tracking service to merchants. This year, 98% of the packages shipped using UPS and FedEx close to Christmas reached their destinations on time. That’s not comforting if you were part of that 2% left waiting, but those weren’t all necessarily Christmas presents. This is notable improvement over last year’s performance.

It helped that retailers cooperated and didn’t promise Christmas delivery for purchases made during the evening on Festivus (December 23rd). Instead, they offered sales earlier in the holiday season, easing the pre-holiday shipping crunch.

UPS, FedEx Got Back On Time This Holiday [Wall Street Journal]

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