In order to keep up with major players UPS and FedEx in a hyper-competitive delivery market, the U.S. Postal Service is seeing a parcel-based future, including expansion of its grocery delivery business.

UPS announced that it expects to hire between 90,000 and 95,000 seasonal employees to support the anticipated holiday surge in package deliveries that will begin in October and continue through January 2015. Last year, all carriers were swamped with orders, many at the last minute, and many deliveries were made after the holidays.

Everyone, from Amazon to Google to Martha Stewart, has been lauding the benefits we'll all reap by the use of drones, and there’s a gold rush on to cash in on the technology. But beware: The trend has all the hallmarks of a bubble-in-the-making, the contemporary equivalent of that symbol of the excess of the millennial tech bubble, the now-defunct Pets.com.

First and foremost, a dedicated holiday supply chain strategy needs to be in place at least six months before the holidays, says Doug Pasquale, senior vice president of supply chain solutions for Ingram Micro Mobility. It's always a good idea to begin planning immediately following the previous year's season and engage manufacturers and logistics partners as soon as possible.

While pop-up retail is not new - dating back to California-based Vacant in 1999 - the concept of pop-up distribution centers is a fairly new one. Following the same idea, it involves setting up a temporary distribution center in a specific location for a set period of time to meet a temporary need, then shutting it down.

Goodman Group, Australia's largest listed industrial property group, says its wholly owned North American subsidiary, Goodman Birtcher, has received approvals for the development of a proposed $350m logistics center in Linden, N.J. The project is part of the recently announced $1.4bn development pipeline in the key U.S. logistics markets of California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

A lack of certainty appears to be the case within the freight forwarding market as momentum fails to take hold. In the latest findings, the Stifel Logistics Confidence Index slipped 2.7 points to 55.2. While still above the important 50-level, too many questions remain unanswered – will a strike be averted at the U.S. West Coast ports, what will happen within the sea freight market now that P3 alliance has collapsed? Is economic growth really slowing?