Ground vs home delivery (ground vs hd) home vs ground

Ground vs Home Ground runs Mon-Fri. HD - Tues-Saturday. Home delivery typically pays less weekly (approx $1500 a week vs $1600-1700 a week on avg at ground).

HD has a fixed $585 monthly bonus that was recently raised to around $700 in many terminals (Ground pays around $850 a month). You’ll likely not get that HD bonus as often as Ground though b/c HD routes more likely to have complaints b/c individuals love complaining and trying to scam fedex for free payouts much more so than a place like Walmart, Target, Etc that Ground is delivering to.

Having Mondays off at HD allows employees to not have to take time off work for things like dentist, doctor, etc. This decreases employee absenteeism.

HD drivers are easier to find and train due to turn by turns (The printout from the terminal that occurs every morning to show the driver what package to deliver, where, and in what order...this doesn't exist at ground.). The turn by turns are not the best at optimization, but they will suffice.

Also, its easier to get an HD route completed for the day b/c a front porch is always "open" vs business receiving hours stopping at 5pm.

HD routes don't have a lot of annoying pickups, nor the stress of having a new pickup that pops onto a route that is not really feasible to get to due to a constrained pick up window. (eg. You own a ground route, you're on the west side of town at 4pm and fedex throws a pickup on the east side of town, 30 minutes away, that can only be picked up between 3-5pm. This is a huge hassle and usually takes fighting with management to explain that such things are just physically impossible).

HD routes often use vans and people are less likely to get into accidents with vans.

To summarize. HD pays slightly less, vans/trucks cost slightly less, employees easier to train, employees harder to find (b/c people don't like working on Saturdays), lower absenteeism due to Monday being off, more likely to have complaints and packages stolen, and finally the maintenance on a HD van is usually quite more b/c people love putting their house at the end of a 1 mile long, washed out, muddy, trench ridden, overgrown driveway (Which is thankfully not as applicable in larger cities).

Each have pros and cons. In the end, I can't say I like HD or Ground more than the other. Honestly, it mostly depends on where the HD route is. A rural or ghetto HD route can be a big problem to own. I'd ride along with the driver on an HD route for a day. If he says "no way", then ask for the manifests (eg. list of stops)

for a couple days and drive there in your car...then pretend where you're going is in a giant Sprinter van or a P500 step van truck and ask yourself, "Does this seem reasonable?" It may very well be, it might not be.