Getting Ready for the 2021 Holiday Season

Preparing the Postal Service’s Retail and Delivery Operations 

In opinion polls, the American people often rank the U.S. Postal Service as the nation’s most trusted government agency, and we know we must earn that trust every day. For us, that means ensuring that the postal network — from the first mile to the last — operates with precision and provides excellent service in every community.

As we head into our peak season, we are confident we will deliver the holidays for the American people.

The 2020 peak holiday season presented unique challenges for our organization.  The unprecedented stress of the COVID-19 pandemic deeply affected our employees and our network. Despite this, the dedicated men and women of the Postal Service processed and delivered more than 1.1 billion packages for our customers. Using the lessons learned, we made operational changes across the organization and the results have been extremely positive, improving our capacity to process and deliver even more packages this year.

In retail and delivery, we now include the use of predictive data to inform us of the status of our delivery units and our carrier routes. We analyze the entire country looking at package delivery, day of delivery and mail volume to ensure that we can quickly respond to any challenge to keep the mail moving across the nation with precision and accuracy. We are expecting and are well prepared for high package volume this season. The use of predictive data gives us the ability to avoid bottlenecks and to process breakdowns. We can respond more effectively to volume fluctuations, deploy our staff more efficiently and ensure our vehicles are fully operational and handled safely.

Under Delivering for America, our 10-year plan, we have made, and continue to make, significant investments into our people, culture, facilities and network that are already improving performance. Every day, I see the overwhelming dedication and commitment from our employees to fulfill our service mission, and I have great confidence that this will be a successful peak season.

Next month, tune in to the official Postal Service podcast, “Mailin’ It,” to hear me and Isaac Cronkite, chief logistics processing operations officer, share our insights on this year’s holiday preparations with our podcast hosts and listeners.

So, send us your mail and send us your packages — we’re ready to deliver for you!

By Joshua Colin, chief retail and delivery officer