FedEx is a private delivery company that appears in The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as a benchmark of competitive performance against the United States Postal Service. Across the excerpts the firm is named by guests and by the host in three distinct arguments: as evidence that government enterprises improve when private rivals take their business, as an illustration of consumer choice among delivery options, and as a rhetorical counter to proposals for government-run services. The excerpts supply no founding date, headquarters, corporate history or financial figures for the company.
Competition and the Postal Service
The most developed treatment of FedEx comes in the 2019 episode with Sally Pipes, who cites the firm in the course of arguing that governments are not as efficient at running things as the private sector. Pipes contrasts the difficulty of renewing a driver’s license or obtaining a new ID card at the Department of Motor Vehicles with the postal service, which she says has become a little more efficient because there is competition between DHL and UPS and FedEx. She describes the resulting consumer behavior: people who want to guarantee something gets to someone quickly use FedEx or one of the private services, while those who are not so concerned use the US Postal Service Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
Bob Zadek returns to the same comparison in the 2022 episode on schooling, telling listeners that if they have any doubt about the effect of competition in the case of schooling, they should think of the US Post Office. He asks them to consider how the postal service behaved and the service it gave before and after FedEx and UPS started to encroach upon their turf in all areas other than first-class mail, and states that there is no dispute the Post Office got better service simply because of the competitive pressures of FedEx, UPS, and the like Students, Not Systems (2022). In the same passage he repeats the point as an analogy for schools: competition imposed by private schools, he says, works as FedEx and UPS did on the postal service.
FedEx Field and the Wisdom of Crowds
FedEx appears in a different register in the 2020 episode with John Tamny, where the company’s stadium naming is incidental to an argument about expertise. Tamny asks his audience to suppose that Anthony Fauci, whom he grants is enormously smart, walks into Redskins stadium next fall for the first Redskins game. It may be, Tamny says, that Fauci is the smartest person at FedEx Field, but the 80,000 fans collectively are much smarter than he is, and it does not even come close, because they bring 80,000 different bits of knowledge and information about how the world works John Tamny on Experts vs. the Wisdom of Markets (2020). The stadium is the only sense in which FedEx figures in that episode; the argument itself concerns markets, decentralized information and the failures of centrally planned economies.
FedEx as a Rhetorical Counter
The 2021 episode with Caroline Fredrickson contains the briefest mention. Responding to her discussion of constitutional reform, Bob Zadek raises the preservation of the post office as a humorous observation, saying he was hoping that would not be there and asking, rhetorically, don’t you use FedEx, before declining to debate whether the post office should be enshrined in the Constitution and asking her not to respond Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution (2021). The exchange is framed by Zadek as constitutional levity rather than argument, and Fredrickson does not take it up.
Across episodes
Three episodes touch on FedEx, and the excerpts show no development in the treatment: the firm is used the same way each time, as a stand-in for private competition against a government provider. Sally Pipes supplies the fullest version in 2019, describing consumer choice between FedEx and the postal service; Bob Zadek converts the same comparison into an explicit analogy for schooling in 2022; John Tamny’s reference in 2020 is to the stadium that bears the company’s name and carries no argument about the firm; and Zadek’s 2021 aside to Caroline Fredrickson is a joke rather than a claim. No guest or host in these excerpts discusses FedEx’s own operations, prices or history, and no speaker disputes the premise that the postal service improved under competitive pressure.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when FedEx was founded, where it is based, who leads it, or how it is organized, and they give no revenue, volume or employment figures for the company. They do not describe any FedEx service in detail beyond the general contrast between guaranteed speed and ordinary mail, and they name no FedEx competitor other than UPS and DHL. Nothing in the excerpts indicates whether any guest has worked for, invested in or litigated against the firm, and no case, statute or regulation concerning FedEx is named. The stadium reference is the only mention of the company’s name attached to an asset, and the excerpts do not say what relationship FedEx has to that venue beyond the naming.