Ell says the cost/service trade-offs involved with going through the Panama Canal to ports in Houston, Jacksonville, Miami or other East Coast locations are being examined by more and more companies, especially when much of the U.S. consumer base is east of the Mississippi River. "It's just another 'what if' scenario," says Ell. Also, there is a trend toward more consideration of air freight.
      Internally, building around air hubs is central to the UPS strategy. But Hundelt says airport and seaport expansions don't necessarily elevate a location for possible UPS growth.
      "Our work has to do with where existing facilities are and what those airports are doing, versus what major passenger airports may be doing," he says, citing Chicago as an example. "We don't have a major facility at O'Hare or Midway. Our major second-day operation is out of Rockford. Like Louisville, it's a smaller-population area, but a major cargo and package operation. Likewise, we don't have a big operation at LAX, but in Ontario [Calif.]."
      The company's U.S. facility build-out is also taking into account the recent acquisition of Menlo Worldwide, allowing the company to execute heavy-freight expansions at five U.S. facilities to handle heavyweight and air freight, with a price tag of a mere $24 million. The regional projects — at existing small-package sites in Ontario, Calif.; Rockford, Ill.; Dallas; Philadelphia, and Columbia, S.C — will create 200 jobs, and supplement the major expansion at the company's all-points air hub in Louisville.
      The company is also growing in Illinois, Louisville, and two buildings each in Mira Loma, Calif., and Dallas. "We would like to have more," Hundelt says of the Dallas campus, "but we need a multi-client base to do that."
      Ell says one way the company looks for new sites is to include in its modelling candidate locations based on customer requirements and demand where UPS-SCS may not have existing infrastructure, as long as fixed and variable cost estimates for sites can be obtained. "We want to be where we can best serve our customers' customers," he says.

Unprecedented Consumer Influence      Logistics suffuses nearly all of this publication's reporting — and a lot of development activity in territories around the world. Retailers alone comprised a large proportion of the more than 1,200 distribution and warehouse facilities entered into the Conway Data New Plant Database in 2004.       There were 14 non-store projects from Wal-Mart in North America alone, seven from Lowe's, and a handful each from such retailers as TJX, Home Depot and Target.       The primacy of logistics is only underscored when you look at what happened to Lee Scott, former Yellow Freight supervisor and then head of logistics for Wal-Mart. He's now Wal-Mart's CEO, and is leading the company's charge into central and eastern Europe as it seeks to achieve 30 percent of its growth outside the U.S. The charge into Asia includes a new Shanghai supercenter, one of three it plans to open in the area.       Perhaps the most retail influence is felt via spinoff, in the realm of freight and delivery facility development outside of the retailers' ownership. Levels of investment by the leading global delivery and freight companies are also ratcheting upward.       The same New Plant Database numbers cited above showed 80 North American projects with "logistics" as their end "product" and 33 more with a trucking or freight end use. Many were from FedEx, DHL and UPS. - Adam Bruns