12-12-2022

This is the last week to get holiday gifts and greetings in the mail by the recommended deadlines. Customer traffic at all Post Office locations has been steadily increasing since Dec. 5, and this week is expected to be the busiest.

The Postal Service has been preparing for the holiday peak — the time between Black Friday and New Year’s Day — since January, building on investments and organizational strategy improvements made ahead of the successful 2021 holiday mailing and shipping season.

Preparations include converting 100,000 workers to full time since the beginning of 2021, with more than 41,000 part-time workers converted to full time since January 2022. A national drive began in October to hire an additional 20,000 seasonal employees, an extra 10.5 million square feet of space has been added to the network to process packages, 23 temporary peak annexes have been opened in addition to the 48 parcel support annexes opened for peak 2021, and we’ve installed 137 new package sorting machines. This brings the organization’s total to 249 new processing machines since the launch of the Delivering for America plan in March 2021. The new equipment combined with increased operational and network improvements will expand the organization’s package processing capacity to 60 million packages a day.

As in previous years, Sunday delivery has been expanded in select locations that experience high package volumes. The Postal Service already delivers packages on Sundays in most major cities. Mail carriers will also deliver Priority Mail Express packages for an additional fee on Christmas Day in select locations.

Source: USPS