I remember sitting in my office on a Tuesday in late January, staring at a UPS surcharge bill that felt like a personal insult. We had just come off a record-breaking holiday season, but when I looked at our net margins, they were thinner than a 2-mil poly mailer. It was a wake-up call for our entire operations team. We had spent so much time optimizing our front-end conversion that we completely ignored the fact that we were bleeding out on the back end. I once watched a brand pay $12 in total shipping and processing fees just to retrieve a $20 t-shirt from a customer in a rural zone—painful, and yet, completely standard for most operators. We’ve become hopelessly reliant on carrier infrastructure, bowing to fuel surcharges and label costs as if they’re an unavoidable tax on doing business. We need to stop talking about "optimizing" the label and start talking about the financial insanity of the label itself.
The State of the Industry: UX is Solved, Margins are Not
If you’re running a $10M+ DTC brand today, you likely have a "good" returns experience on paper. Platforms like Loop Returns and Happy Returns have revolutionized the way customers interact with the "un-buy." They handle the "why" of a return, the exchange logic, and the instant store credit perfectly. For the customer, it’s a seamless dream. For the Shopify merchant, it’s a sleek digital layer on top of a very expensive physical problem.
But here’s where the P&L gets ugly: those platforms are great at User Experience (UX), but they don't solve the underlying physics of moving a box. No matter how pretty the portal is, the final step in almost every workflow is the generation of a carrier label. Whether that package goes to a USPS hub or a regional last mile delivery station, someone is paying for that movement. We’ve spent a decade asking how to make the return easier, but we haven't asked why we are still paying a carrier to move a package across three states just to get it back into sellable inventory.
The "Last Mile" Problem: Why You Are Still Paying
Now the tricky part regarding carrier rates is that the "First Mile" of a return is actually the "Last Mile" for the carrier—and that’s the most expensive leg of the journey. When you hear people ask, "what is last mile delivery station?" or "what is a last mile delivery station?" they are talking about the final sorting facility where a package is loaded onto a delivery van. In the world of returns, your customer is essentially the origin point for a reverse journey that must pass through a last mile sorting and distribution center.
The physical cost of the label, the box, the tape, and the fuel surcharges is only part of the drain. In 2023, we analyzed our zone shipping data for a footwear brand and realized that even with "negotiated enterprise rates," the residential surcharges were effectively raising our floor by 15% year-over-year. We tried negotiated rates with FedEx, but the residential surcharges still killed us on the aggregate. Honestly, shipping a return back to HQ usually makes zero financial sense for any item with an AOV under $80. You are paying a carrier to transport your losses.
Ops teams always ask me: What does last mile delivery station mean for my inventory velocity?
It means your inventory is trapped. When an item is processed through a lastmile delivery network, it’s sitting in a bin, then a truck, then a sorting center, then another truck. Last mile delivery station tracking might tell you where the item is, but it doesn't tell you the condition. (Yes, I’ve panicked over these spreadsheets too, especially when explaining to a CFO why $50,000 worth of inventory is "in transit" during our peak sales window). By the time that lastmile parcel hits your warehouse, the season might be over.
Deciphering the Last Mile Sorting and Distribution Center
To understand why this is so expensive, we have to look at where is last mile delivery station infrastructure usually located. These stations—including the ones that power the amazon final mile—are typically placed on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas. They are massive, high-overhead facilities designed to sort millions of packages. When a customer searches for a "last mile delivery station near me," they are usually trying to figure out why their return is sitting in a warehouse thirty miles away for three days.
The "sorting" part of a last mile sorting and distribution center is a high-labor, high-energy process. You are paying for that facility's rent, the sorter's wages, and the electricity to run the belts. This is why last mile delivery costs represent up to 53% of total shipping expenses. Now, think about the reverse. When you ask a carrier to handle your last mile parcelin reverse, they don't give you a discount for the "convenience." They charge you for the friction.
Transitioning to "Zero-Shipping" Logistics
Recently, I've seen a handful of elite brands switch to a model that removes the shipping carrier from the equation entirely. They’ve moved away from the question of "Which carrier is cheapest?" and toward the question of "How do we keep the item in the neighborhood?"
The Hyper-Local Approach: Neighborhood Infrastructure
This is where the neighborhood infrastructure layer comes in, specifically through a model that treats the community as the warehouse. Imagine a scenario where the software directs the buyer to a nearby drop-off spot—perhaps a local storefront or a vetted neighbor in their own community.
How it works:
-
No Labels: The customer drops the item off without needing a printer or a box.
-
The Hub: A vetted local seller in that specific neighborhood picks up the item or accepts it directly.
-
The Velocity: The inventory stays local. It doesn't go to a last mile delivery station near me; it goes to a neighbor who can fulfill the next local order.
Closo operates as this infrastructure. It isn't a shipping company; it’s a logistics hack. By keeping the item local, no shipping labels are generated. There is no FedEx or UPS truck involved in the return leg. The item moves three blocks instead of three states. The "First Mile" and the "Last Mile" become the "Only Mile."
Running the Numbers: The Calculator Wedge
Discussing the difficulty of calculating savings is common when you are used to the standard carrier model. We are conditioned to think about "discounts off retail rates." But the math changes entirely when you remove the carrier.
-
Label cost = $0.
-
Box cost = $0.
-
Fuel Surcharge = $0.
-
Processing at a last mile sorting and distribution center = $0.
It’s hard to visualize the impact of "zero shipping fees" until you see the P&L impact side-by-side. Most brands assume shipping is an unavoidable tax, but the math changes when you keep items local.
Comparison: Standard Return vs. Hyper-Local Recovery
(Don’t ask me about Q1 returns where we had to hire temp labor just to open boxes that had been sitting in a last mile delivery station for a week—the labor cost alone wiped out the resale value).
A question I hear from CFOs often: What is the last mile delivery station cost for my specific brand?
The "Informed Peer" answer is that you aren't just paying for the station; you're paying for the inefficiency of the hub-and-spoke model. If you look at your UPS or FedEx bill, you'll see a base rate, but look closer at the "Residential Delivery Surcharge." That is the tax for the driver leaving the last mile delivery station to go to a single house. In a hyper-local model, that surcharge is deleted because the "driver" is a neighbor or the customer themselves walking to a local hub.
The Strategy of Local Recovery
Founders are realizing that the most profitable return is the one that never gets on a truck. Every time we move a last mile parcel back to a central warehouse, we are gambling on its future value. If the item stays in the neighborhood, the "Path to Purchase" for the next customer is drastically shortened.
Now the tricky part regarding carrier rates is that they are designed to protect the carrier’s margin, not yours. Even the amazon final mile infrastructure—which is arguably the most efficient in the world—still relies on the massive overhead of the last mile delivery station. By decentralizing the return process, you aren't just saving on shipping; you are building a more resilient, localized supply chain.
Conclusion: Cutting the Carrier Cord
The state of last mile delivery in 2025 is at a breaking point. Carriers will continue to raise rates as fuel and labor costs climb. The brands that win over the next decade won't be the ones with the best carrier contracts; they’ll be the ones that don't need carriers for every transaction. Once we cut the carrier out of the return leg for our pilot brands, our recovery rate doubled because the inventory was back in "sellable" condition in hours, not weeks.
The legacy model of shipping everything to a central last mile sorting and distribution center is a relic of the catalog era. In the age of local density, it’s a financial drain we can no longer afford. We stopped worrying about what does last mile delivery station mean and started focusing on what a neighborhood hub could do for our P&L.
If you want to calculate exactly how much you’d save by eliminating return shipping labels, check out the calculator we built. It compares your current carrier spend against a local hub model.
Authentic Insights for Ops Leaders:
