College students ordering en masse have made a mess of at least one college campus mailroom this fall — it simply isn’t big enough to handle the load.
The news comes out of the University of Connecticut’s Daily Campus, which reported that “the number of packages received by the university for residential students has been increasing drastically in recent years, in large part due to the rise in online purchases…As a result, there is a growing need to find long-term solutions beyond hiring more staff.”
The main culprit? Students ordering from Amazon Prime to kick off the new school year, as the UConn newspaper first reported on Sept. 18. UConn’s campus was receiving “four times as many packages,” as usual, from “small packages to very large boxes containing mini-fridges and other sizeable items.”
University officials put the overload at about 3,000 more packages per day, which kept staff busy sorting until 3 a.m., at the beginning of the school year.
UConn said it was looking into ways to modify its mailrooms, which were built for letters and regular mail delivery, not for large packages from UPS, FedEx and USPS.
In addition to affecting college mailrooms, as Business Insider points out, campus bookstores face an uncertain future as well, as more students order books online.
As Amazon Prime is offered free to college students for six months and at $49 per year after that, it seems this is an issue colleges would best deal with now rather than later. The ease of ordering cheaper books, dorm furniture and gadgets is too appealing an option for students and will likely become their go-to way of shopping — if it isn’t already.
