What to Expect at Eye-Kraft
The Teamsters and UPS have been negotiating their contract for several months now and there is a good possibility that the union will go on strike on the 1st of August.
UPS is Eye-Kraft’s primary air and ground carrier for non-postal service shipments, and a strike will have a significant impact not only on our deliveries for UPS, but also on our inbound inventory shipments, consumables, frame to come and dropship frame movement, maintenance and repair parts and other critical logistics items. These effects will of course not be limited to Eye-Kraft, and we expect to see significant impacts in transportation and logistics across all markets and sectors in the US. Please prepare for shipping and process delays caused by supply chain failures not only with Eye-Kraft, but with all domestic shipping activities.
Here is our plan if the strike happens. We think the best way to protect your product and your patient-owned and office owned frames is to hold UPS shipments for up to three days into the strike. Other carriers like FedEx, Speedee, and USPS will be inundated with excess volume and won’t be able to absorb the extra flow without serious issues. Because of this we won’t be moving carriers. In fact, these other companies are putting in restrictive policies to limit temporary use during the strike in some cases. We think a delay of a few days is better than losing or damaging entire boxes of your orders in a system that’s jammed up in one of the most significant labor actions in US history.
We hope the strike, if it happens, will be short lived and an agreement will be quickly reached. If, after the third day, the strike isn’t resolved, we will ship all held deliveries via USPS Priority Mail, as we feel they will recover from the initial influx most quickly and packages will have the best chance of successful delivery. The transit times will be slower on this work, but in this situation, getting the boxes to you is most important to us.
We thank you for your understanding and for your help managing patient expectations during this time, we’ll do everything we can to help make this as smooth as possible.
