Shipping delays have long tested the patience of many Wrangell residents who order all sorts of goods online, but a late-summer social media post pointed to a breakdown far worse than usual. 

The August frustrations began surfacing publicly when Kathy Jo Blackburn shared details on the Wrangell Community Group Facebook page following a call with freight personnel in Anchorage.

According to Blackburn’s Aug. 19 post, she was informed by someone with FedEx that an Amazon software update around July 23 inadvertently redirected Alaska-bound Amazon shipments away from standard postal deliveries and into the FedEx network.

“The Anchorage hub got overwhelmed with all the Amazon packages and they had to get corporate involved before Amazon would change it back to not shipping via FedEx to Alaska,” Blackburn wrote. 

She went on to write that during the week and a half it took to correct the routing error, sorting facilities in Tracy, California, began holding freight because Anchorage could not accept the volume. In Anchorage, workers began loading backlogged Amazon parcels into shipping containers, filling seven containers entirely with FedEx-routed Amazon shipments with no way to get the deliveries to communities in Alaska that lack direct FedEx service, such as Wrangell. 

FedEx acknowledged the widespread delivery issues across the state.

“An unexpected surge in e-commerce shipments is causing temporary delivery delays in parts of Alaska,” Heather Wilson, with FedEx media relations in Memphis, Tennessee, said in an Aug. 20 statement. 

Amazon said the distribution problem has since been cleared.

“We’re aware that some customers experienced delivery delays. We take these matters seriously and we’ve been working to resolve the situation, with deliveries now running as normal,” Emma Crowley, an Amazon public relations representative, said in a statement on Sept. 2. “We encourage any customers with outstanding orders or delivery concerns to contact our customer service team, and we’ll make it right.” 

The bottleneck exposed key differences in how commercial carriers move freight into Wrangell, which relies on separate transport routes depending on the company handling the package.

For United Parcel Service shipments, cargo moves aboard ACE Air Cargo flights from Anchorage to several cities in Southeast Alaska. The company’s planes can carry about 5,000 pounds.

In Wrangell, the packages go to C&D Deliveries, a private courier that holds the UPS contract to sort shipments and deliver them to homes and businesses. 

Amazon orders do not follow that path. Instead of contracting with door-to-door couriers in Wrangell, Amazon relies primarily on the U.S. Postal Service for the final leg of transit. Amazon freight is handed over to the postal system at major sorting hubs, flown into town by commercial air carriers and delivered to the post office for box holders to pick up in person.

When the summer routing glitch diverted Amazon orders away from the postal network and into the FedEx system, the parcels entered a network that lacked a direct last-mile delivery partner in Wrangell. The resulting logjam left hundreds of packages sitting in Anchorage containers rather than arriving at the post office counter, according to Blackburn. 

With comments on community discussion boards exceeding 50 responses and 100 likes, Chris Booker, owner of C&D Deliveries, floated an idea to see if Wrangell residents wanted an alternative to postal counter pickups. 

“With a show of hands, how many households here would be interested in hiring our services at a monthly fee to pick up your parcels from the post office and deliver to your preferred location?” Booker asked in an Aug. 23 social media post. 

Booker later emphasized that the idea was strictly exploratory and faces major operational hurdles. 

“There’s nothing to report right now as it’s all just an idea at the moment,” Booker said. “The two biggest hurdles would be having some sort of legal framework in place that allows us to get legal custody of people’s federal mail first, and second is the challenge of how this service would be funded.” 

While UPS pays C&D Deliveries a per-package fee, no such payment system currently exists for post office pickups. 

“There’s just no way the general public would be willing or able to cover a fee like that,” Booker said. “So I’m just getting feedback from the public to gauge interest, talking with the post office about legalities and trying to determine a way we could offer services at a reasonable cost.”

As for the person whose Facebook posting started the discussion, “I can report that my three family members and myself have received all our packages that Amazon had sent via FedEx, so I am assuming that the issue has been resolved,” Blackburn said Sept. 10.

“I have also placed orders with Amazon this month that have arrived as well.”