Melody Treece Vargas has just written the third piece on the Retail Industry in About.com. She writes that we can see a significant growth in outsourced fulfillment providers like UPS I wrote about earlier. As the holiday season starts off more and more consumers would find their packages being delivered by providers who work for the company they ordered from. I guess these providers will be much more efficient than the 1999-2000 season where we saw so many snafus. People just did not get their Christmas shopping deliveries in time. Luckily things are much better now. The "fulfilling" industry has crossed 1.5 B $ according to Vargas and in doing so has created a new distribution and logistics channel in the 21st Century!