Now that the holiday gifts they’ve unraveled, it’s time for the rushes to return.
How Latonya Rascoe was getting the latest wave of Christmas gifts ready to ship from a FedEx office in Anchorage, Alaska, another wave was arriving.
“We even work Christmas Day here at the front desk, taking your returns,” Rascoe said.
The National Retail Federation predicts that nearly $900 billion in products will be returned this year.
The holidays are coming back quickly
The NRF expects about 17% of sales to return this year, peaking between now and January 2.
Last year, e-commerce purchases were the most likely to be returned, making for a much longer holiday shipping season.
“It’s returns of everything they don’t like, everything they don’t want, everything that was too small, too big, we return,” Rascoe said.
At the FedEx shipping center in Anchorage, they sort up to 80,000 packages a day.
FedEx’s holiday rush runs from the beginning of Thanksgiving until three weeks after Christmas, according to FedEx senior ramp manager Tracy Watkins. It works to maintain the nearly three dozen cargo planes that will move 80,000 packages as scheduled.
Each cargo plane can carry more than 20,000 packages. From Alaska, a key global gateway, they could travel to FedEx hubs in Oakland, Indianapolis and Memphis, or to Asia and the Pacific.
Return policies
Worldwide, FedEx previously handled about 16 million daily deliveries Christmas.
Before returning unwanted gifts, experts advise doing your homework, as return policies vary.
Nerdwallet’s Kimberly Palmer warns some retailers they can even collect funds to send goods back.
“Keep them in their original packaging,” Palmer said. “You have the receipts and you don’t wait. A lot of people miss the deadline for returns to be processed.”
