Americans ordered what FedEx is calling an unprecedented amount of merchandise online this holiday season, especially at the last minute. They’re blaming that growing habit and weather problems for the delay of some packages, which resulted in some employees working as real-life Santas on Christmas Day to clear the backlog and make sure that as many packages as possible reached their destination by the holiday.

FedEx foresaw bad weather conditions during Christmas week, and did put out warnings that this could happen. However, they didn’t realize quite how many packages would pass through their system in the pre-Christmas rush, and the company’s systems didn’t cope well with what it called “an unprecedented surge of last-minute e-commerce shipments.”

Every year’s e-commerce volume is unprecedented, since the amount of shopping that people do online is only increasing. The combination of bad weather in much of the country and robust e-commerce sales among its clients meant that the company dispatched thousands of employees on Christmas and the following day, which was a Saturday.

According to tracking firm ShipMatrix, about 80% of the packages in Mid-Atlantic states that would have passed through that region’s FedEx hub at Newark airport in New Jersey arrived at their destinations on time. UPS didn’t have similar issues, having vowed to never let anything like the Christmas Non-Delivery Fiasco of 2013 happen again.

FedEx Cites ‘Unprecedented’ E-Commerce Surge in Christmas Delays [Bloomberg News]

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