ATLANTA, May 3 DHL is the big winner this year in the annual package race staged by students at Georgia Tech to test the mettle of the major delivery services.
John Bartholdi, a logistics expert at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been organizing the race since 2003. His students pick out five suitably remote addresses from among their friends and acquaintances and then ship packages to them via DHL, Fed-Ex and UPS.
This year's destinations were Yangon, Myanmar; Tikrit, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's hometown and a center of Sunni insurgency -- the small island of Floranopolis in Brazil; Harare, Zimbabwe; and Apia, Samoa. The packages were shipped April 13.
This year, DHL got to all five locations, arriving first at three and second at the other two. FedEx delivered three of the packages and UPS two. One package is still somewhere in the system, neither at its destination nor returned to Georgia.
"The world's not quite flat," Bartholdi said. "The last mile is always the hardest." The students track the packages as they head toward their destination. One year, a shipment crossed the Atlantic nine times.
The recipients get something for their trouble -- Georgia Tech mugs, T-shirts and similar memorabilia.
Copyright 2007 by UPI
