Bike, car messengers persevere

By Keith Coffman
Denver Post, January 30, 1999

With the widespread use of fax machines, e-mail and other online services in offices, it might seem as though courier services were obsolete.

Not so. In fact, courier services in the Denver area - including those folks you see tearing around Downtown on their bicycles with packages - are in abundance. And industry representatives say they expect to be operating well into the next millennium.

But they have had to modify and diversify their range of services.

"People predicted the demise of couriers when the fax machine came along in the 1980s, but people still more readily accept an original, hand-delivered document," said Bob DeCaprio, executive director of the Messenger Courier Association of America, a 300-member trade association based in Washington, D.C.

And a quick glance at Yellow Pages listings ? shows more than 100 companies offering delivery services along the Front Range.

"It's so competitive and the level of expectation so high, that if you drop the ball, there are five companies waiting in the wings to take over the account," said Chris Grealish, owner of Denver-Boulder Couriers, a delivery service that features both car and bicycle messengers.

While his business dropped slightly with the electronic advances, Grealish said his company, which he formed in 1988, picked up the slack by offering other services such as prescription deliveries. Also, he said, many companies still find it more economical to hire a bicycle messenger to deliver a large document Downtown than to use an office worker's time faxing the paperwork.

"E-mails and faxes have redefined the industry, but it still seems viable," Grealish said.

He said his company is growing by 20 percent annually, and it did $1 million in sales for fiscal 1998.

But Grealish said he is concerned about possible legislation that might allow law firms to file motions online, rather than producing the original, paper-generated documentation that is now required by courts. Law offices, he said, are a big part of his business.

DeCaprio said advances in technology have boosted the industry's productivity in many areas by improving communication and logistics with on-vehicle computer maps, electronic product and service information, and route scheduling.

 Rick Ressler, general manager of one of Denver's largest courier services, Express Messenger
Systems Inc., said there are plenty of items that cannot be transmitted electronically. The need to deliver laboratory specimens, X-rays, cash bank deposits and oversized items such as building blueprints will never go away, he said. "We'll move just about anything as long as it's safe," Ressler
said.

Express Messenger is a subsidiary of Citicorp and Air Canada. The company employs 115 drivers in Colorado and had $6 million in revenue last year, he said.

A greater concern for Ressler than the threat of becoming a dinosaur due to technology is the day-to-day logistics of getting couriers through traffic gridlock in the Denver metro area.

"The slowing down of traffic means hiring more drivers to make our timed deliveries," Ressler said.

For example, Ressler said, the recent Stock Show parade and the governor's inauguration forced an on-the-fly rerouting of his couriers to get around Downtown Denver.

DeCaprio said it's hard to put an exact figure on the number of courier companies in the country, be cause it's difficult to define what constitutes a courier service.

"It's tough to guess because it can range from one guy in a small town with one car and a walkie-talkie to taxicabs who make deliveries," he said.

DeCaprio said that factoring out package delivery companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service, there are probably about 5,000 messenger companies nationwide, and his association estimates the industry generates about $3 billion annually.