‘Don’t wait.’ See how Fresno post office handles millions of seasonal holiday packages
The U.S. Postal Service is gearing up for what will be the busiest week of the busiest part of 2024.
The number of packages and other mail to be delivered this holiday season counts 5.9 billion and counting, according to a running tally on the USPS website.
And the post office is in full show-off mode.
On Thursday night, it invited media to tour Fresno’s processing and distribution center, a nearly 200,000-square-foot warehouse space on E Street near downtown.
The facility is handling more than 100,000 packages daily, according to plant manager Sunny Grewal. And “letters are close to a million pieces.”
That means hundreds of millions of letters, packages and other mail will be handled over the holiday season. For context, the facility shipped out nearly 3 million packages (and 450 million letters) in 2021.
The efficiency of this comes from a combination of advanced equipment (some of it new this season) and around-the-clock work of its more than 300 employees (including those hired to meet the holiday rush).
This is a warehouse full of conveyors and sorting machines working on automated systems that scan bars codes and read zip codes to sort the cardboard boxes (some Christmas-wrapped packages and LOTS of letters) into the various delivery bins.
At full capacity, the machines can work through more than 6,000 packages an hour — a speed 12 times faster than if it were to be done manually, Grewal said.
All of this helps ensure that, despite the extra payloads, the holidays at the the local post office (and at your mail box) come off like any other time of year.
“Just more,” Postmaster General and CEO Louis DeJoy, wrote in a statement on Thursday.
“We are committed to delivering exceptional service throughout the peak holiday season and beyond.”
Can you still get packages delivered before Christmas?
All post offices are closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, with regular delivery running Thursday after each holiday. But procrastinators still have time to get to post office and have their packages delivered by Dec. 25.
Deadlines to ensure delivery by Dec. 25 are:
- Dec. 18, for USPS Ground Advantage service and First-Class Mail service.
- Dec. 19, for Priority Mail service.
- Dec. 21, for Priority Mail Express service.
This story was originally published December 14, 2024 at 2:30 PM.