The United States Postal Service’s deadline to get Christmas packages mailed on time begins this week.
Strategic Communications Specialist Albert Ruiz said that this year’s shipping deadlines are December 15th for USPS retail ground; December 17th for first-class mail; December 18th for priority mail; and December 23rd for priority mail express.
“It is actually moving pretty good,” Ruiz said. “We are starting to see an uptick of course in our package volume, but I’ve been out to a couple of mail processing facilities lately and they are flowing pretty good so things are definitely moving.”
Ruiz said that this year they anticipate delivery 850 to 950 million packages, with more than 12 billion combined with letters and cards. He said last year they made over 13 billion deliveries. Ruiz said he attributes the slight decrease to brick and mortar buildings being open for shopping after the pandemic.
Ruiz said that this year they have better prepared for the holiday shopping season. He said that the USPS has invested some $40 billion in planned investments over the next ten years.
“So part of that, we normally start preparing for our holiday peak season in the summer, this year we actually began back in February and March,” Ruiz said. “We’ve made investments in our mail-processing equipment. We installed 112 new state-of-the-art new package sorting machines throughout the county. They are able to process thousands of packages an hour, they’re able to sort an additional 4.5 million packages each day.”
Ruiz said that even with all of the improvements, there are still things folks can do to help streamline the process. He recommends not reusing boxes and getting fresh ones from USPS. He said that it’s also a good idea to put a return address and shipping address inside of the package should the box get damaged.
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