It’s an exhilarating time for USPS. In the fourth year of our 10-year transformation, we are seeing real change in our operations and a clear path to the financial sustainability and service excellence envisioned in our in our Delivering for America plan. A significant part of that mission is the establishment of our new sorting and delivery centers, or S&DCs, a national network of strategically located facilities that will bring greater efficiencies and reliability to the postal system and help us elevate our service performance.
S&DCs bring focus and structure to a network that for too long has relied on a haphazard and ever-growing patchwork of destination delivery units (DDUs), many of which are too small, ill-equipped and poorly maintained. With nearly 19,000 DDUs across the country, we were not only operating a costly delivery network but also perpetuating a system that has hindered our ability to evolve with the market as demand for package delivery soared.
The answer to this problem is our new system of S&DCs. Each of these large, spacious, well-equipped facilities — many already owned by the Postal Service or on a long-term lease — typically consolidate the work once assigned to about 10 DDUs. Each S&DC will use the latest automated sorting equipment to serve upward of 200,000 customers daily, bringing new efficiencies to our delivery operation and improving our service performance. S&DCs are also a critical part of the largest fleet electrification program in the nation, and as the future home to tens of thousands of our new electric battery-powered delivery vehicles, these facilities will contribute significantly to our aggressive environmental goals.
I cannot overstate the importance of S&DCs to the success of our Delivering for America transformation. We put a lot of effort into choosing each site — not just for its current capabilities but also for its ability to support our growth in the coming decades. We’ve been busy identifying and upgrading sites since we inaugurated our first S&DC in Athens, GA, in November 2022. I’m proud to say we are on track to have 82 S&DCs fully operational by the end of September, serving 6.3 million delivery points and 13.3 million people. That is a remarkable achievement that shows we can and will have all the roughly 400 S&DCs planned under Delivery for America operational by 2030.
We are already seeing the benefits of our S&DCs. At each facility, we have installed small delivery unit sorter machines that can process a minimum of 2,500 packages per hour — and as many as 4,300 packages per hour for high-capacity models — versus the 270 an hour we were working by hand in old DDUs. Consolidating DDUs into a single S&DC removes the duplication and repetition inherent in the old network, meaning fewer truck routes and less processing — major steps in our plan to improve service performance and reduce our emissions footprint.
These new S&DCs also vastly improve our employee availability. By combining the roster from seven to 10 DDUs under one roof, we are better prepared to allocate extra resources or assign relief coverage. This critical mass of supervisors and employees also allows us to improve how we inform, mentor and train our staff. Every day, we find new opportunities to make our S&DCs more effective.
As crucial as our S&DCs are to the operational goals envisioned in our Delivering for America plan, they are equally important to our mission to make the Postal Service the best place for our employees to work. That’s why we involved our unions early in this initiative and why we continue to meet regularly with them to evaluate each facility’s performance. We are also spending three to four months meticulously upgrading every building, making them cleaner, brighter and better equipped than old facilities. They are specifically designed to be safer and more effective places to work. We’ve also renovated restrooms and break rooms, adding amenities that make our employees’ work environment more inviting.
It means a lot to me that our employees have welcomed the move to these S&DCs. They can see the efforts we’re making to revive the Postal Service, and their support is essential if we are to rebuild USPS into the modern, effective and financially self-sustaining organization we need to become.
And this is just the beginning. Once we have opened every S&DC, we will have the national infrastructure in place to truly distinguish ourselves from our rivals and provide local shippers across the United States with unparalleled access to hundreds of thousands of potential customers, all from a single point in our processing network. This is the vision we have for the new Postal Service: to be an employer of choice and a trusted and reliable delivery partner for American businesses, not just for now but well into the future.
Joshua Colin
Chief Retail & Delivery Officer