The harder truth: You've misread my putting forth the case for a disruptive personal shipping company as my attempt to get UPS and FedEx to change their businesses.
(That'd be kind of odd on a site where discussion centres around technology and startups…)
When you can't get the vegetarian food you want from the supermarket, you go to the smaller, pricier, vegetarian outlet.
Shipping consolidators pick up a shipper's parcels, sort and route them, then enter them into the Postal system for final delivery.
A shipping consolidator startup would be able to offer many of the value-added services on your wishlist without facing the barriers of starting a stand-alone national carrier or the limitations associated with local/regional carriers.
Of course, you lose control of the actual handling of the package after turning it over to a 3rd party carrier. Still, I'd imagine that a shipping consolidator using RFID data could develop a sufficiently sophisticated predictive model capable of providing much more accurate delivery estimates than those provided by the UPS, FedEX, et al.
(That'd be kind of odd on a site where discussion centres around technology and startups…)
When you can't get the vegetarian food you want from the supermarket, you go to the smaller, pricier, vegetarian outlet.