Postal Service promises that robots, thousands of hires will deliver Christmas on time

With Christmas less than two weeks away, the United States Postal Service is making an all-out push to get packages delivered on time. New facilities, machines and thousands of holiday hires are all part of USPS’s holiday shipping plan.

Back in October, WRAL News looked into a neighborhood in Rocky Mount that didn’t get mail for over a week.

During that investigation, a spokesperson for the Postal Service said they’d been dealing with staffing shortages across North Carolina.

With the country also facing supply chain issues and Christmas Day fast approaching, WRAL News went inside the postal service’s plan to avoid shipping delays.

“We’ve definitely hired 40,000 people nationwide, seasonal positions,” USPS Communications Specialist Philip Bogenberger said. “But we’ve also hired 100,000 people from the beginning of this year through January that are going to be helping out with everything that we’ve got going on.”

On top of the new hires, the Postal Service has opened 100 new package sorting annexes across the country.

WRAL News went inside the new Sandhills facility, south of Fayetteville, which is responsible for taking in every package shipped from southeastern North Carolina and sending them nationwide.

“This is what we call a manual breakdown area,” USPS Annex Supervisor Nate Purcell said. “Eventually we’ll get up to probably 150,000 to 250,000 packages a day coming out of this building.”

Along with the human staff, the site has another tool: an automatic package sorting machine, one of 112 new sorting machines being activated across the country.

“I love this machine. We put the mail on here, and it reads the barcode, and it sorts it for us,” Purcell said. “This machine, it processes a little over 3,000 pieces an hour.”

The sorter is in addition to 12 robots, unveiled in October, that move packages around the facility.

“We place the package on the robot. and it literally takes the package to the container,” Purcell said. “They don’t need no breaks, lunches. They just do their little thing.”

It’s a nonstop operation, but with USPS expecting to ship more than 800 million packages during the holidays, would it be enough?

“Definitely, we’re ready for the holidays,” Bogenberger said. “The investment in our people, the investment in our machines, we’re ready.”