UPS too busy to notice retailers' soft holiday sales: package volume will be greater than last year, according to company officials.

Either online shopping is increasing, or everyone is sending homemade cookies for Christmas this year.

Holiday sales are reportedly soft at big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Target, but the number of packages moving through the United Parcel Service doesn't reflect that.

"Package volume this season will definitely be up over last year," said UPS spokesman Norman Black, from the firm's corporate headquarters in Atlanta. The company does not officially release projections.

"Despite who is up and who is down, we seem to be pretty much on track," Black said. "We serve brick and mortar and online retail. This year, we are seeing very strong online e-tailing shipping." UPS is the primary shipper for 20 of the top 25 e-retailers, as ranked by Internet Retailer Magazine.

Consumers are also using the Interact to follow their packages. UPS officials expect to field over 130 million tracking requests the week before Christmas, including 25 million on Wednesday, Dec. 20.

On that day, expected to be the busiest shipping day of the year, more than 21 million packages will be shipped, Black said. He also expects procrastinators to make the following Friday the company's peak air delivery day, with 5.5 million packages to be transported, by shoppers who need to send via air to make sure their packages arrive by Christmas.

In order to deal with the holiday influx, UPS has hired an additional 60,000 seasonal employees, predominantly to assist in home-to-home deliveries.

In the Los Angeles area, one of the busiest markets in the country for UPS, more than 1,200 employees were hired in October and will remain with the company through the end of December, said Larry Wogoman, communications supervisor in the L.A. office.

"On these peak days, we have to expand capacity by 40 percent," Black said. That means adding 31 jets to the UPS fleet, which is already the eighth largest in the world, and 7,000 tractor-trailer and delivery trucks.

The massive volume has forced UPS to work virtually all year on planning adjustments to help it handle the holiday load.

"Ever since we started handling packages, the only thing that has changed is the amount by which we have to flex our system," Black said. "It is a driver miracle and it is a management miracle that we can flex far enough to handle this kind of demand."

BY SARAH FILUS

Contributing Reporter