Thousands of their jobs are at stake under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s ten-year “Delivering for America” modernization plan, which would close two hundred mail processing plants and funnel all mail to sixty mega-plants called regional processing and distribution centers (RPDCs), each with a football field–sized parcel sorting machine — a series of conveyor belts, scanners, and chutes that can sort five thousand packages an hour.
USPS is chasing its competitors Amazon, United Parcel Service (UPS), and FedEx, which already have bigger and more automated facilities like the UPS Worldport hub in Louisville, Kentucky, the size of ninety football fields, where a package touches human hands only twice — on its way in, and on its way out — traversing thirteen minutes of conveyor belts in between.
