People who live in rural Wyoming aren’t catching any breaks lately when it comes to deliveries of their packages — including medications — that they rely on.
Take John Ramer, who lives in southeast Wyoming near Hartville at the Kindness Ranch, where he is the nonprofit animal sanctuary’s executive director.
The ranch, in particular, relies on speedy deliveries to help with its mission caring for hundreds of rescue animals.
Ramer had already discovered the hard way that UPS has cut down its delivery days to the ranch, when he tried to order an emergency laptop ahead of a trip to rescue some puppies arriving in the U.S. from the West Bank.
Now he’s just learned that UPS is eliminating 20,000 UPS workers and closing 73 facilities after reducing the volume of Amazon packages it handles.
Ramer has tried — to little avail — to ask his suppliers to switch his deliveries to FedEx he told Cowboy State Daily.
“I’ve even gone to the extent of chatting with Amazon to try to get them to put flags on our account that our preferred shipper is FedEx,” Ramer said. “But they still send everything UPS, and it’s so frustrating because they only come out here like Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
That often means an item ordered for next day delivery through their business Prime account isn’t arriving for an entire week later.
“Yet we’re paying for business prime,” Ramer said. “It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
Delayed deliveries aren’t just confined to UPS, he added. He recently had a package that was sent through the U.S. Postal Service that took 10 days to travel from Denver to the ranch as well.
“I just don’t understand why these communities that rely on (deliveries) the most are so overlooked and discarded,” he said. “It’s really, really frustrating. I’ve got a sanctuary manager out here now who is like eight months off of open heart surgery and all of his heart medications come from Amazon. Those are still taking five, six days to get here now.”
Major Cuts
UPS announced the layoff of 20,000 workers and the closure of 73 facilities during its first quarter earnings call on Tuesday, with CEO Carol Tome citing “uncertainty surrounding global trade policies and other matters” which led to a “drop in consumer confidence and muted demand from some enterprise and SMB customers” and higher than expected declines.
Tome said the company will accelerate its 50% “glide down” of Amazon volume, which has not been profitable for the company, and isn’t seen as a good fit for the company.
“The Amazon volume we plan to keep is profitable and it is healthy volume,” she said. “In other words, volume where we can add value like returns and seller-fulfilled outbound volume.”
UPS will also reconfigure its network to optimize its capacity, Tome said.
This will “lessen our dependency on labor, reduce the capital requirements needed to run the network, and will drive structural operating margin and return on invested capital improvements.”
Tome said she is confident the plans will be completed with “little customer disruption and at the right cost to serve.”
She also said the network would remain convenient and accessible for customer drop-offs and pickups, with a network of 5,300 UPS stores and 29,000 drop boxes or UPS Access Points.
“Ninety percent of the U.S. population lives within 5 miles of these locations and about two-thirds of them are open on Sundays, for added convenience.”
The UPS SurePost service, where the U.S. Postal Service had delivered the last mile for some deliveries, is being replaced with a new service called Ground Saver, which Tome said will balance “speed and reliability” for customers, while still allowing “operational flexibility” for UPS.
USPS has been renegotiating all of its “last-mile” contracts with shippers, in many cases eliminating them.
UPS is also heading in a completely new business direction, with the recent acquisition of Andlauer Healthcare Group. This is a Canadian company with 39 dedicated health care facilities across that country, along with cold chain packaging and specialized transportation solutions. That deal is expected to close in the second half of 2025.
Savings, But At What Cost
The layoffs, facility closures, and other measures Tome is taking are expected to save UPS $3.5 billion in 2025, according to reports during the earnings call, 35% of which are attributable to the layoffs.
Tome’s announcement during the earnings call did prompt a response from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien.
“United Parcel Service is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs under our current national master agreement,” he said. “If UPS wants to continue to downsize corporate management, the Teamsters won’t stand in its way. But if the company intends to violate our contract or makes any attempt to go after hard-fought, good-paying Teamsters jobs, UPS will be in for a hell of a fight.”
Regardless of the layoffs, UPS spokeswoman Karen Tomaszewski Hill told Cowboy State Daily in an email that its “record of reliable pickup and delivery” would not change.
“We remain committed to providing industry-leading service to customers in more than 200 countries and territories around the world,” she said. The announced strategic initiatives will “optimize the capacity of our network to align with expected volume levels and enhance productivity through additional automation. The reconfiguration will impact positions, and we are committed to supporting our employees throughout this process.”
Rural Areas Suffer
Rural Wyomingites like Ramer, on the other hand, are taking a wait-and-see approach to how things will shake out, recalling past troubles with deliveries, as well as more recent examples.
Like the $1,000 guitar Ramer ordered that ended up being delivered by UPS, in spite of his request that the company use FedEx instead.
That arrived in a squashed box that foretold problems ahead for the guitar inside.
“They put a ton of weight on it and it broke the neck off,” he said. “They just destroyed it.”
UPS drivers have also told Cowboy State Daily about past problems they have observed with the service, including food and medications that required refrigeration left out in hot warehouses overnight instead.
Ramer said he personally hopes that if new contracts are negotiated that more companies move to FedEx.
“They were here twice today,” Ramer said Wednesday night. “We’ve got two different drivers who come out here, and they’re great guys. We have relationships with them. And when we order things like chews for the dogs and cats, they call us and let us know when they’re close by, so we can meet at the loading bay.”
However, he’s also aware that things could get worse for rural deliveries than they are now.
“I have heard stories of how like 10 years ago, the UPS wouldn’t even come out highway 270 out there, so all of our stuff was dropped off at the hardware store in Guernsey,” he said. “We had to go in and pick it up from there. It wouldn’t surprise me if the cuts do affect our local area and we have to go back to that.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
