Pros
I worked for Fedex Express which is actually owned by Fedex and not contracted. That is a huge plus because of the pay and benefits. I liked that my “office” was primarily my delivery truck. It was nice to work autonomously and do things my way (to a degree). Getting outside especially during nice weather. Driving with the door open and window open always felt great. I was lucky to have a brand new truck that had AC. While working in the warehouse I did make many good friends. I enjoyed getting to know many customers on my route and having a strong rapport with them. Good benefits like cheap health insurance, 401k with good match, and when I was hired I also got a pension but that may not be available to new hires anymore. In my opinion pickups were my favorite over deliveries. It gives you a much more routine route so you know what to expect. You always got overtime (whether you wanted it or not) and anything over 40 hours was time and a half. You also got time and a half for every hour you worked over 8 so even if you didn’t work more than 40 hours in a week you still got overtime for working over 8 hours. When you hit 12 hours and more it was double time. If you work your day off (your 2nd day off is Sunday and that’s everybody) the entire shift is time and a half. If they happen to let you work Sunday as well then it’s double time.
Cons
Lifting heavy items up to 150lbs, often times on my own. Often having a truck packed front to back and floor to ceiling and trying to work around that while sometimes having to pickup packages before your deliveries were done. Serious time commitments that varied depending on the service used for the package. You would have to pass locations that you had deliveries for to get to other spots that had earlier delivery commitments. Sometimes I would have to go to the same business 2-3 times a day due to the way deliveries are made and also pickups. This could be a pro depending on what you want but most employees worked over 40 hours each week, usually 50-60. You did get overtime for it. You got an ok amount of vacation but you had to schedule for an entire year way in advance so you never knew yet what days you actually needed and just had to pick weeks. You have to use your vacation in blocks of weeks instead of using all single days. You were given 4 single days to use separately. Once you had many years of seniority you were allowed to breakup some of your weeks. Also, you bid for vacation and it starts with the most senior employee and ends with the newest. The issue with that is they make everyone bid all of their weeks in one go so the senior employees would bid all 5 weeks (5 weeks is the most you can acquire and you have to have 20 years to get it) on the best months of the year while the bottom employees (who only get 2 weeks) had to wait and see what was leftover and bid their 2 weeks. It never seemed fair and I always thought the senior employees should only get to pick 2 weeks first and once everyone made their choices then it would go back to the top and bid the rest of the weeks. When I was new I rarely could get anytime off during the summer or spring break. The whole month of December was always blacked out. 5 years of seniority gave you 3 weeks and 10 is 4 weeks.