Bad weather affects Christmas deliveries

The weather and and overwhelmed courier networks have cost some online retailers millions and pushed logistics departments to their limits as companies race to make sure Santa didn't get stuck in a delivery depot on Christmas day.

According to the Financial Times, companies including John Lewis and Marks and Spencer stopped taking online Christmas orders earlier than planned to ensure they could make deliveries on time.

Heavy snow has kept shoppers away from stores in advance of Christmas, forcing some listed retailers to warn the market of falling sales and pushing more shoppers online. But courier services have struggled to get those deliveries through to areas in rural England and northern Scotland and Wales.

“This is a hugely busy time for online sales. It’s not something you do lightly,” said Dino Rocos, John Lewis’s operations director, of the company’s decision to suspend Christmas orders three days early.

“When we do the numbers, we will see that there was a significant additional cost to managing our way through this,” he said.

Home Delivery Network, one of the couriers John Lewis uses to deliver goods ordered online, suffered unexpectedly severe delays because of snow, and the retailer had to turn to its other contractors to help deliver the group’s 1.2m Christmas packages, Mr Rocos said.

A source close to HDN said a backlog had built up after early December snowfall in Scotland. The company spent an extra £10m on hiring extra staff but had to limit the number of parcels it could commit to delivering.

Russell Lewis, warehouse manager for logistics company Uniserve, said imports could get into the UK but he has a two-week backlog for getting packages out via courier to retailers.

“[The snow] knocks us out for a couple days, and the recovery is slow,” he said. “As you’re trying to recover from the first batch, you’re hit again.”

City Link stopped taking new packages for shipment to Scotland on December 16, and on Thursday warned customers to expect delays of up to five days on deliveries to areas including Ashford and Scunthorpe in eastern England.

Image: Santa's sleigh
Source: FT©