I lived in an East suburb of Memphis in the early 90’s. Collierville was a favorite place to go eat and shop. And Fed Ex was the pride of Memphis. This is really a tragedy.

But today, Bob watches with a growing sense of distress as the forests and fields he played in are clear-cut to make way for massive, multi-family apartment complexes. His unease solidified into alarm when a friend who teaches at a local elementary school mentioned a startling statistic: nearly 80% of her students were now minorities, with half of the student body being of Indian descent and requiring ESL services. The town he planned to raise his own children in is rapidly becoming unrecognizable.

This paragraph could have been about my town in Ohio because that's exactly what's happening here. Very small farm town now is a traffic nightmare with all the apartments and subdivisions being built. Roads are too small to handle all the extra population. Instead of Indians, it's South Americans. Additionally, for the first time, we're starting to see black gang activity. My youngest graduates from high school next year and then we're out of here.

If an Indian ever makes it to Senior management. They’ll plot the downfall of the people above them in the pecking order. In order to get their jobs and The bulk of new hires inevitably end up being Indians and everyone else gets eventually gets laid off or fired.

It’s an ethnic cartel. One of many operating in the country we like to pretend don’t exist. Because acknowledging them. Let alone introducing legislation to combat them. Is both a tacit admission that our system of individualistic meritocracy was successfully weaponized against us. And that Western values are in fact not broadly applicable or the default mode of being for humans. Which is contrary to what many Western philosophers and thinkers have postulated or believed or the centuries.

Being in a rural area, I buy a lot from Amazon out of necessity.

From my limited visibility, when I track things it appears Amazon is moving the bulk of their shipments outside the USPS system. Been this way for most of the last year. I'm guessing Amazon has stepped up to completely replace Fedex, at least for Amazon's stuff.

They appear to be much more efficient than USPS and then drop the packages at my local PO directly, bypassing the USPS network.

I don't know what their future plans are. Perhaps they view this as a competitive advantage and will keep it inside Amazon. But I can see how expanding this to directly compete with Fedex and UPS would be a logical extension.

Fedex is primed to be eclipsed and replaced under a scenario like that.

On a local note, Fedex has absolutely sucked lately. I used to have a regular driver who was pretty reliable. Our road can be challenging so I never held it against them if they were a day or two late. But l recently had a packaged where they delayed it four days in a row and it wasn't due to bad weather or road conditions. Didn't recognize the driver name, didn't get the usual photo of the delivery dropoff. As it is now, I wouldn't choose to use them if I had a choice.