On November 8th, the USPS officially went into Peak Season. This is the kick-off to the busiest time of the year for the organization with mail volume increasing to more than triple what is put through their system during the rest of the year. The USPS is expected to deliver at least 12 billion total pieces of mail and packages in 2021.

But the major question that the consumer, major mailers, and everyone in the industry is asking – will the USPS encounter the same issues from 2020?

2020 brought a once-in-a-generation challenge – COVID. The outbreak of COVID began in late 2019 sweeping across the world and through the states at an uncontainable pace. By March, the CDC labeled the outbreak as a pandemic, and the response to the disease defined the year. In a year where the death toll for COVID was over 300K, the USPS still had the responsibility to deliver the mail. And now with the entire country on lockdown, mail and packages became critical lifelines. The postal worker became a frontline hero.

This event and its circumstances brought enormous strain on the postal system, from how to protect its workers to deal with a massive influx of packages. Everything including the USPS was under massive strain and threatened to break down. And this was even before the 2020 Presidential election and the record number of mail-in votes.

The 2020 Holiday Season / Peak Time 

To simplify the nine months into a few sentences would be a disservice to every single person who lost a loved one, who fought and survived, who worked on the frontline – The best place is to review the timeline on the CDC website. It will give you the scope of what has happened in just a few short years. 

In December 2020, Sandra Lindsay, a nurse in New York, became the first American to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. After months of clinical trials, a vaccine against the disease was released and by December 24 over 1 million people had been vaccinated. 

Though a feeling of hope merged perfectly for the holiday season, most Americans still lived in the safety of their houses, and with that came a massive amount of consumer need. From everyday goods to Christmas presents, the USPS saw an increase in packages by over 40% from the previous year. This led to an increase in oversized packages, which take more manual effort to process and it also meant that facilities that were built to handle letters created bottlenecks throughout the system. 

These issues caused grief to an already exhausted public. This flooded into questions about the overall direction of the organization under its new leadership and if some of these issues could have been averted.

Will the USPS’s plan for 2021 be enough (and will their long-standing alliance with Santa be involved)? 

Here is what the USPS plans to do to deal with the expected impact of those 12 million new packages/letters. They will be adding 45 new facilities, 112 new sorting machines, and hiring an additional 40 workers to handle the upcoming holiday season. With these enhancements, the USPS hopes to be able to handle more than 50 million packages a day – a 35% increase from 2020 – with the goal to avoid the delays that impacted mail delivery.