As someone with an interest in traffic, and a more casual interest in operations research, I was curious about the order history on a recent item from Apple I had purchased. As you will note from the illustration above, the item was shipped from FedEx’s Memphis hub to Newark, where it then made its way to Brooklyn, where I live. But the item wasn’t delivered. Why? The reason given explains everything, yet explains nothing: “Package not due for delivery.” OK. So it wasn’t due for delivery. But couldn’t FedEx have delivered it anyway, given that it was in my home borough?
No. The item then went back to Newark, only to finally be shipped, once again, to Brooklyn, where it finally arrived on my doorstep. Now, I’m no OR genius, and there may be some variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem, or some intricacy of routing and logistics that I’m missing here, but why, for an industry always trying to root out inefficiencies (e.g. UPS’ famous ‘left-turn’ software), would it send my product on an extra round trip, bloating its inventory for a few more days? Perhaps some reader can enlighten me.