College mailrooms are getting overwhelmed by their students' Amazon Prime orders
Colleges are being inundated with their students’ Amazon orders and are having to rearrange their entire mail systems to handle the cardboard flood.
The University of Connecticut now has more than 100 students staffing its mailroom to handle online ordering, the Daily Campus’ Fatir Qureshi reports, as the practice has surged in recent years.
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“The student mailrooms in the residence halls were designed primarily for mail delivery rather than packages and were originally constructed for the convenience of residents,” Logan Trimble, executive director of Building Services, told the Daily Campus. “But over the years, the standard ‘letter’ has been replaced by package deliveries and we are seeing a record number of UPS, FedEx and USPS packages.”
Most of it’s coming from Amazon Prime, the Daily Campus’ Kyle Constable reported last month. The service offers free two-day delivery.
“As I understand it, we received about four times as many packages as usual this fall,” university spokesperson Stephanie Reitz told the Daily Cmpus. “They range from small packages to very large boxes containing mini-fridges and other sizeable items.”
The problem is not unique to UConn. Qureshi writes that other area schools now have a central warehouse where large packages are distributed to individual mailrooms.
[h/t Connor Sen and Myles Udland]
Rob covers business, economics and the environment for Fusion. He previously worked at Business Insider. He grew up in Chicago.