UPS COO to Retire

November 05, 2019 – – International shipping company UPS recently announced that their Chief Operating Officer, Jim Barber, who has been responsible for much of the company’s global shipping operations and engineer, will be retiring at the end of December of 2019. Jim Barber started as a delivery driver for UPS in 1985 and has since progressed through the company until becoming COO in 2013. Since becoming COO, Barber has taken responsibility for growing the company’s reach internationally through the Asian and European markets, and worked to expand shipping around the world. As a long time and important figure in UPS’s business, Barber was often thought by industry analysts to be the next person to lead the company, which means many investors were caught by surprise, which is not something that the stock market generally likes. As a result, the share price of the Atlanta-based company fell three percent after the announcement.

UPS has been a name in the shipping business since founders James E. Casey and Claude Ryan founded the American Messenger Company in the Pioneer Square neighborhood in Seattle in August of 1907. At the time, the pair made deliveries on foot or by bicycle, focusing on delivering packages to retail stores as well as making deliveries for the United States Postal Service. The company went through a couple of name changes, settling on United Parcel Service, or UPS, in 1919, after expanding delivery operations to a second location in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. It continued to expand from there. When UPS finally became a public company after nearly 100 years of operation, the initial public offering was among the largest of the century. Since then, international delivery services have been a hot business, especially since online sales have become more popular, since every online seller needs to be able to reliably ship their wares to the customer, including the Amazon-based kitchenwares company Sunsella.

UPS has a fleet of over 120 thousand delivery vehicles around the world, from bicycles for deliveries in congested and bicycle friendly downtown urban areas, to airplanes for international shipping, and many, many kinds of vehicles in between. Many of these vehicles are alternative fuel vehicles, such as trucks running on hybrid electric engines or compressed natural gas. In fact, UPS has been well rated by the Climate Counts Group which rates companies on environmental friendliness, scoring 80 out of 100 points on things it can be doing to lessen the company’s environmental impact.

All of these deliveries are part of a global shipping network that does lots of shipping around the world. Improvements in shipping technology, such as those fostered by the founding of companies like UPS and the further research and development that these companies are able to perform because of the business they are afforded by a capitalist system that demands increasing globalization, plus the technology of the internet and the incredible advances in the online shopping economy made by companies such as eBay and Amazon make it possible for all kinds of companies from all over the world to access potential customers around the world and increase their potential profits significantly over what they might be able to manage if they were only selling to people who could reach them in person. Online sales and shipping has allowed for the development of more specialized products, because things that might not get enough general interest to be available at stores 24/7 can still find their niche audience and ship directly to them. One example of a company that is riding on the wings of UPS and other shipping companies in this way is the small time kitchen supplies manufacturer Sunsella, which makes a variety of tools for use in the kitchen and sells their wares on Amazon. The broad reach of UPS’s delivery network is, in many ways, in thanks to their COO, Jim Barber, who will be retiring at the end of this year, after a long and successful career with the United Parcel Service.

###

For more information about Sunsella, contact the company here:

Sunsella
Mike Law
(702) 952-9541
info@sunsella.com
9550 S Eastern Ave
Suite 253
Las Vegas, NV 89123

ReleaseID: 60032017