Midnight Express

In a 24-7 society, every minute counts. But do all minutes count the same?

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In our 24-7 society, every minute counts. But is getting the most out of the evening minutes the most crucial thing? That's what some small companies think as they set up shop near FedEx's superhub in Memphis

When people speak of Memphis as a city that never sleeps, they're probably not referring to late-night jiving on Beale Street. Yes, you can still find a few honky-tonk clubs that rock late into the night in the downtown area that W.C. Handy and other blues notables made famous long ago. Nowadays, however, Beale Street is fairly restrained. It has been officially sanctioned as the Beale Street Historic District. It pipes down by 2 a.m. or so.

No, the real nighttime action in Memphis isn't downtown. It's at the airport. A human wave rolls through the Memphis International Airport in the early evening. Much of the foot traffic is due to the Northwest Airlines hub there. Thousands of Northwest passengers change planes each evening in Memphis. Far more extraordinary, though, is the controlled frenzy later on at the 55-acre colossus that's the airport terminal building of the FedEx Corp. Each weekday night between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., 162 FedEx planes land in Memphis and take off again. During the four-hour interval, 13,000 workers unload 1.5 million packages from inbound planes; they then sort the packages and reload them onto outbound planes. In FedEx-speak, the terminal is MEMH (for Memphis hub), or, now that the carrier has seven lesser hubs in other U.S. cities, the superhub.

The nocturnal drama that unfolds with military precision at the superhub is well-known and much celebrated (especially by FedEx). Less conspicuous is a related burst of nighttime business activity at other locations in Memphis. Lights blaze late into the evening at all manner of companies: laptop-repair shops, barbecue purveyors, aircraft-parts dealers, and dot-coms hawking everything from prescription drugs to CDs.

For many of those companies the raison d'Être of their Memphis operations is what you might call the "superhub advantage." In Memphis, as in other cities, FedEx begins its daily shipping cycle each morning by dispatching its familiar white trucks with the purple-and-orange logo to collect packages from customers. But Memphis differs from other cities in a critical way. FedEx's deadline for accepting packages that it promises to deliver by 10:30 a.m. the next business day is later in Memphis -- generally, much later. The deadline in New York City is 9:30 p.m. In Atlanta it's 9. Minneapolis has only till 7:30. In Los Angeles the final pickup time is 6:45.

Because FedEx packages originating in Memphis usually ride on one plane rather than two, the last call for pickups in that city is as late as 11:30 p.m. (or even midnight, if customers drop off packages at a FedEx office themselves).

The extra hours translate into a competitive edge for companies savvy enough to exploit it, the city's business leaders say. And over the past half dozen years, a growing number of companies, eager to partake of the 24-7 service they believe customers in the Internet era have come to expect, have established a superhub-linked operation in Memphis to do just that. Evening pickup in Memphis has become so popular that in February FedEx began offering a diluted version of it in 90 urban areas nationwide. Memphis nonetheless retains an edge. The service in other cities costs $15 extra, generally requires a somewhat earlier pickup (8 p.m. on the West Coast), and doesn't guarantee delivery until 3 p.m. the next day.

Lights blaze late into the evening at laptop-repair shops, barbecue purveyors, aircraft-parts dealers, and dot-coms hawking everything from prescription drugs to CDs. Many of those companies were drawn to Memphis by what might be called the "superhub advantage."

Among the companies that have opened up distribution centers in Memphis are behemoths Nike, Hewlett-Packard, and Williams-Sonoma. But small companies, too, have heeded the superhub call. To learn about the advantage firsthand, Inc. accompanied Alex Clevenger, one of some 80 FedEx second-shift couriers in Memphis, on his rounds one chilly evening in March.

Clevenger, 36, is an easygoing man of medium height who parts his chestnut hair in the middle. He starts his shift at 2:15 p.m. and finishes at 11:30 p.m., with an hour off for "lunch." As he steers his truck through warehouse-dotted sectors of southeast Memphis, he talks about his job and how it fits into the city's emerging mosaic of nighttime enterprises. His pride in being part of that world is unmistakable. "We have a lot of these companies moving into Memphis strictly for FedEx," he notes with satisfaction.

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