| Hi everyone, Spencer Soper here. With just a week left before Christmas, it's do-or-die time for the delivery machine Amazon.com Inc. has been assembling over the past few years.
Shoppers will spend a record $135 billion online in the last two months of 2019, and Amazon in April committed to next-day delivery on millions of items to up the pressure on competitors like Walmart Inc. and Target Corp. And now it's also ditching the training wheels of long-time logistics partners like United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp.
Amazon officially issued a no-confidence vote in FedEx ground delivery this week when it banned independent merchants from using it for quick delivery of Amazon Prime orders, saying FedEx's performance is slipping and shoppers might not get their packages in time for the gift-giving day.
What gives Amazon the confidence to publicly shame a company it had long relied upon is the maturation of its own delivery system -- which analysts expect will one day rival FedEx and UPS. The Amazon logistics network includes nearly 200 so-called fulfillment centers where products are packed and labeled for delivery to shoppers. Those warehouses are populated by more than 200,000 robots, and the company is constantly optimizing its stock inventory and geography to shorten delivery times. But that's old news for Amazon.
More recent additions include nearly 50 cargo planes used to adjust inventory around the entire U.S. and more than 150 delivery stations where individual orders are loaded onto Amazon vans for the so-called final mile of delivery to a customer. It's that last mile that Amazon has aggressively invested in this year, with 30,000 vans around the U.S. now designated exclusively for delivering its customers' orders. Those beefed-up investments allow Amazon to now deliver about 50% of all U.S. orders from the warehouse to the doorstep without any help from UPS, FedEx or the US Postal Service, according to Morgan Stanley.
Amazon competitors, delivery partners and the media will be watching closely for any sign of the growing delivery machine buckling under the strain of holiday orders and expectations. But no one will be watching more closely than Dave Clark, the man who oversees Amazon's worldwide logistics operations and has been putting all of the pieces in place for the past several years. Known for his affinity to risky gambles, he is about to learn if this year is a big win or a big loss. | 
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