WASHINGTON — The United States Postal Service announced it has completed the installation of 137 new package sorting machines ahead of the holiday mailing and shipping season. The new equipment combined with increased operational precision will expand USPS’s daily package processing capacity to 60 million.
This brings the organization’s total to 249 new processing machines since the launch of the Delivering for America plan in March 2021 and are part of a $40 billion investment in the postal network. The final new package sorting machines were recently installed in Lafayette (IN), Orlando (FL), Lake Havasu City (AZ), Erlanger (KY), and Lynchburg (VA).
The Postal Service’s preparedness for the holiday shipping and mailing season reflects strategic investments and operational precision improvements made as part of the Delivering for America plan. Additional holiday hiring initiatives include:
- Stabilizing the USPS permanent workforce by converting 100,000 workers to full time since the beginning of 2021; with more than 41,000 part time workers converted to full time since January 2022.
- Actively hiring an additional 20,000 seasonal employees ahead of the holiday season.
With the holiday mailing and shipping season nearing, USPS also reported new delivery performance metrics for the sixth week of the FY2023 first quarter. The average time to deliver a mailpiece or package across the postal network was 2.5 days for the third consecutive week.
FY2023 first quarter service performance scores covering Oct. 1 through Nov. 11 included:
- First-Class Mail: 92.1 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a slight decrease of 1 percentage point from the fiscal fourth quarter.
- Marketing Mail: 94 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a slight decrease of 0.7 percentage points from the fiscal fourth quarter.
- Periodicals: 86.4 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fiscal fourth quarter.
One of the goals of Delivering for America, the Postal Service’s 10-year plan for achieving financial sustainability and service excellence, is to meet or exceed 95 percent on-time service performance for all mail and shipping products once all elements of the plan are implemented. Service performance is defined by the Postal Service as the time it takes to deliver a mailpiece or package from its acceptance into our system through its delivery, as measured against published service standards.
The Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.