A UPS driver’s view of returns, reverse logistics, and why UPS’s pullback from Amazon doesn’t feel like a clean break.
When was the last time you visited your local UPS Store? Your answer probably depends on whether – and how much – you shop online.
In early 2025 United Parcel Service announced it was reducing by more than half the number of Amazon packages it would deliver. Explaining the move, UPS’s Chief Executive Officer Carol Tomé told investors that ‘Amazon is our largest customer, but it’s not our most profitable customer.’
While I’ve definitely noticed fewer Amazon packages on my UPS package car over the past year, that changes dramatically once I arrive at the UPS Store on my route.
According to its website, ‘the UPS Store is a locally owned franchise offering a range of products and services designed specifically to help small business owners in the local community.’ But as far as I’m concerned, its primary purpose is serving as a drop-off location for Amazon returns.
Typically UPS Stores have at least two daily scheduled pickups by UPS drivers like me: the ‘close-out’ at the end of business, and one or more ‘prelims’ earlier on so their limited storage space isn’t exceeded by the packages customers drop off throughout the day.
I don’t always have one of these pickups, but when I do, I’m hauling several dozen parcels out of the UPS Store at the very least. It’s not unusual – especially during the ‘Peak’ holiday season – for me to collect 100-150 or more packages in one visit. A vast majority of these are returns to Amazon.
So even as Amazon delivers more and more of its own packages to its customers, it’s still relying heavily on UPS to ship many of those packages back. I once asked a UPS Store employee approximately what percentage of the parcels they took in were Amazon returns. Without hesitating they told me, ‘Oh, 90, 95 percent – easily.’
Returns have always been a part of retail, but they’ve mushroomed since Covid. Retailers estimate that in 2025, 15.8 percent of total sales – brick-and-mortar and online combined – will be returned. For online sales alone, the percentage is even higher, at 19.3 percent. (According to a 2023 New Yorker article, ‘returns of apparel are often double that.’) This amounts to about $850 billion worth of unwanted merchandise just this year.
This growing phenomenon of returns is now a trillion-dollar industry referred to as reverse logistics. Its trade group, the Reverse Logistics Association, was recently absorbed into the considerably older and larger National Retail Federation, an indication of the rising prominence of returns in retail.
But even as reverse logistics is becoming ever-bigger business, it’s also becoming an ever-bigger headache for retailers. All the major players, Amazon chief among them, face pressure to make returns as frictionless as possible. ‘Easy returns are like free shipping: they can be a dealmaker or a deal-breaker when a consumer is deciding where to shop, even though in both cases the cost is ultimately borne by the consumer.’
I’ve been a UPS driver long enough to remember when customers returning an Amazon purchase at the UPS Store had to bring (or buy) suitable packaging and have a return label (ready to be) printed up.
Now the process is more streamlined. Apparently customers need only bring the merchandise and some form of electronic information identifying the items being returned; they hand these over to a UPS Store employee and walk away. So not only is the return ‘free,’ it’s also ‘easy’ and ‘fast’ – even though they have to drive to the UPS Store and (sometimes) wait in line.
Obviously Amazon is paying UPS for each return it ships. The UPS Store also gets a cut. So from Amazon’s perspective, reverse logistics is a money-losing cost of doing business. ‘Returns are expensive for sellers, since shipping alone often costs more than the item can be resold for.’
Outside of Amazon and a handful of other retail behemoths, a whole ecosystem of third-party businesses – most with names no online shopper would recognize – has arisen to do the tedious, and occasionally odious, work of triaging returns: determining what can be resold (typically at a fraction of the price), what can be ‘stripped for parts,’ and what must be ‘destroyed’ (i.e., sent to a landfill).
I would include UPS Stores as part of this ecosystem. They aren’t triaging per se, but they’re definitely an entry point into the reverse logistics machinery.
As I load packages onto my hand truck, I watch UPS Store employees place numerous items, bagged in clear plastic, into large cube-shaped boxes bound for specific Amazon facilities – combining many customers’ individual returns into a single package. It calls to mind a scene from the 2009 Pixar film Wall-E.
‘Retailers have a fraught relationship with reverse logistics,’ reports longtime observer Amanda Mull in a 2023 article in The Atlantic. ‘Returns are not what the companies want to do, or what they built themselves to do. They were built to sell.’
Likewise, I have decidedly mixed feelings about my own role in facilitating returns for Amazon and others. I was built to deliver.
I may not have to worry about it for much longer. Just a few months ago, USA Today reported that ‘Amazon quietly rolled out a partnership with the USPS [United States Postal Service] this summer, offering doorstep return pickup in select markets.’
I can imagine Amazon redirecting all or much of its returns business from UPS to the USPS. I can also imagine Carol Tomé being perfectly okay with that.
So when I pull into the UPS Store now, I’m reminded that delivery is only half the story. For every three or four boxes that land on someone’s doorstep, there’s at least one making its way back – often through the same hands, the same buildings, the same trucks.
Amazon may be shipping fewer packages with UPS, but the river of returns still flows steadily in the other direction. And for the time being, at least, I’m still there to help carry it along.
