How does the post office deliver mail?
EAGAN, Minn. – This busy holiday season, the United States Postal Service has delivered more than 10 billion packages and pieces of mail.
It takes a lot of workers, and a lot of technology. So how does the post office deliver mail? Good Question.
On the day we did the rounds with mail carrier Bernie Schroeder, he was in the 11th hour of his shift. No, really – he had been working for 11 hours. These are the typical hours required during the holiday season.
By the end of the day, Schroeder will have delivered to 500 homes. He and the other carriers leave the back of the Eagan Post Office each morning with full trucks.
Dana Smith oversees the customer service.
"When the carrier comes in in the morning, they grab their packages," Smith said.
Which they then sort by address.
"They get all their other mail ready and then they leave through that door," Smith said.
The hundreds of letters Schroeder will deliver that day have already been sorted the night before at a 90-acre mail processing plant a few miles away in St. Paul. The building runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
First, they flatten the pieces of mail that come from the trucks to the conveyor belt so they can be fed into this machine. It flips the mail in the right direction, scans its zip code, sprays an orange ID tag, and then sprays a black barcode that holds all the address's information.
From there, the machine sorts the letters by location into 12 different bins. Those bins are then brought to other machines, which sort by zip code and finally individual address.
Then another machine sorts the mail by address, or "walk sequence," which means the letters are now all in the right order for the carrier's route. At the same, from above, the barcodes on packages are also being scanned.
It will all go in a specific bin for a specific post office location, like Eagan, where Schroeder will make his rounds again tomorrow.
"This time of year it's fun when you're delivering all the packages," he said. "They're like, 'Oh yay, it's here! Thank you, you made my day!' That makes you feel good."
