Since its founding in 1819, the city of Memphis Tennessee has occupied a unique and powerful position in the growth of North American logistics and communications infrastructures. Referring to itself as “North America’s Distribution Center,” Memphis’ location along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River in southwestern Tennessee has privileged the region as an important East-West crossroads within the United States. While the Mississippi River has historically formed the continental division between eastern and western United States, the river, in conjunction with expansions in freight rail networks and the Interstate Highway system has provided the region with one of the most efficient systems to transport bulk cargo in the country. Over the decades, however, Memphis has positioned itself as a palpable international trade hub as well with the establishment of the FedEx Express SuperHub at Memphis International airport in 1973. Located just three miles south of Memphis’ central business district, the FedEx Super Hub has since grown into a city all its own, employing more than 15,000 people, while maintaining a fleet of 75,000 trucks and 684 jets. 

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Less than two miles north of the Mississippi State Border, the FedEx Super Hub and Memphis International Airport are circumscribed by Interstate 240 to the north, Interstate 69 to the west, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Rail Depot to the east. Within this infrastructurally circumscribed geography, FedEx’s hub in Memphis has universal connectivity to all major global markets. From its hub in Memphis, airfreight is sorted and routed to one of four major North American sorting facilities either in Newark, Oakland, Fort Worth, or Indianapolis. Cargo destined for locations within less than “one day’s truck drive” or approximately 400-500 miles of the sorting facility is trucked via Interstate to a local FedEx facility, while air freight bound for destinations farther than one day’s truck drive is flown to regional airports, via a contracted cargo airline and delivered to a local facility closer to its final destination. International cargo is routed to one of five major global sorting hubs in Narita Japan, Guangzhou China, São Paulo Brazil, London England, or Paris France and delivered to either regional FedEx facilities or contracted out to other air freight couriers and flown to the country of destination.  

 

In looking at its facilities on the ground, the scale of FedEx’s operations in Memphis is given truly human dimension. At its busiest peaks, FedEx’s hub in Memphis operates revolving shifts of ground staff on twenty-four-hour cycles, with fueling, maintenance, and security staff working all day cycles throughout the year. These continuous cycles of labor, transportation, and goods in Memphis mirror the truly global mechanics of the FedEx network, constantly at work at an international level. At any given time somewhere in the world, day-time labor and movement corresponds with night-time operations somewhere else, literally dissolving the physical and geopolitical boundaries that identify and locate the operations. Both time and geography are conflated by FedEx’s network, making the only barriers relevant in this system the ones created by the aviation and auto infrastructures that enable FedEx’s operation.  The geospatial logic of FedEx’s operations is brought into lucid focus by studying the continental networks of high-capacity freeways and international airports that give global dimension to FedEx, and FedEx’s economic research has shaped an interconnected world where demographic and economic cartograms, not projected geopolitical maps, are the most operative forms of representation for their business.

 

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Sources: 
FedEx Express Super Hub, news.van.fedex.com/Files/FedEx%20Express%20Super%20Hub%20Memphis.pdf,
Memphisregion.transportation.asp,  
Rushing, Wanda. Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South. UNC Press, 2009. Pgs. 3, 84-89,  Rayport, Jeffery. 
The Miracle of Memphis in MIT Technology Review. December 2010, 
Shelbycountytn.gov/index.aspx?nid=542