USPS averages 2.5 day delivery time heading into busiest week of the year

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) - The busiest days of the year are quickly approaching for the United States Postal Service. “This is our Super Bowl. We’ve been gearing up for this since January,” said spokesperson Rod Spurgeon. “In this facility last night, we processed about 620,000 packages. That’s a whole lot of packages for just one day.”

The USPS package processing plant in Phoenix is about 500,000 square feet. There’s another processing plant for where cards and letters are sorted. “Our busiest time of the holiday season is Dec. 12 through Dec. 17.” To handle the holiday demand, Spurgeon said USPS added 137 processing machines across the country and 28,000 seasonal workers. This year, 41,000 employees also went from part-time to full-time positions. “Our average delivery time right now is 2.5 days across the nation,” Spurgeon said.

To avoid shipping glitches this holiday season, sign up for Informed Delivery by USPS and confirm the delivery address. Tap/click here to sign up for free. “If you’re sending it to an apartment complex, and the apartment is 2B for the unit, put the 2B on there. If you’re not sure of the zip code, you can go to our website, USPS.com and look it up, or do no ZIP code at all. No ZIP code at all is better than a bad ZIP code,” Spurgeon said.

You should also pack the box with plenty of stuffing, so there’s no rattling around inside the box. Use packing tape across all of the seams and put the address on a card inside of the box, too. “That way if anything happens to the label in the shipping process, if it gets smeared or falls off, we can open up the package, pull up the card and say, ‘Oh! Here’s where it’s going,’ put it on the box and send it on its way,” Spurgeon said.

To make sure your gifts get to their destinations safely and on time, make sure to check the USPS holiday shipping deadline dates here.

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