The US Postal Service has expanded Sunday deliveries and will even make express deliveries on Christmas Day in some areas as it handles a record-breaking holiday season.
The state-owned postal operator expects to deliver nearly 200 million packages this week, a similar figure to last week, as part of an overall seasonal haul of 900 million packages and about 15 billion pieces of mail for delivery between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day.
The overall holiday season figure would be about 50 million packages, or about 6%, more than in the same period last year. Overall, USPS delivered more than 1.7 billion packages in the final three months of 2017.
USPS already delivers packages on Sundays in most major cities and, to handle the surge in holiday volume, has this year expanded Sunday delivery operations in select high package volume locations. The operator expects to deliver more than 8 million packages each Sunday in December.
Moreover, mail carriers will also deliver Priority Mail Express packages on Christmas Day in select locations, it pointed out.
USPS was expecting its busiest online day of the year yesterday with nearly 400,000 customers visiting usps.com for shipping services and overall nearly 5 million consumers are predicted to take advantage of online services, like Click-N-Ship, to order free Priority Mail boxes, print shipping labels, purchase postage and request free next-day Package Pickup.
The postal operator is also promoting its Informed Delivery product, its free daily ‘digital preview’ of what’s heading for consumer mailboxes that also offer some package management options.
