As part of its 10-year plan to achieve financial sustainability and service excellence, the Postal Service announced major investments in network infrastructure to meet the evolving mailing and shipping needs of American public and business customers before the 2021 holiday season.
These initiatives and investments include:
- An accelerated investment and sourcing of 138 parcel handlers, which will be operational before the 2021 peak holiday season, with plans to purchase additional processing machines over the next 18 months as parcel volume grows. As USPS expands its role in the e-commerce marketplace, we will deploy and maintain a diverse suite of package sorters and material handling equipment to optimize processing throughput. In March, USPS customer demand for parcel deliveries was up 28 percent year over year.
- Renting an additional 45 outbuildings near processing centers in key locations to support the surge and overflow of parcels.
- The relocation of mail processing to 18 facilities was previously interrupted in 2015. These selected relocations will follow USPS ‘existing contract process and will be completed by November 2021. Due to the decline in mail volumes, we will relocate or remove unnecessary letter and flat sorting systems as necessary to make space for urgently needed parcel processing. Moving, removing, and reusing mail processing equipment and operations, or “operational mail moves,” has been an ongoing postal service strategy that has been going on for decades that enables more efficient, timely delivery of mail and parcels. A list of the affected institutions is available at usps.com/deliveringforamerica.
“The future of the postal service depends on its ability to adapt to the changing needs of our customers,” said Postmaster General and CEO Louis DeJoy. “These initiatives and investments give our employees the infrastructure and technology they need to reliably and efficiently serve today’s e-commerce market. This optimization will result in more efficient and reliable performance in our factories, which in turn will improve our ability to predictably and reliably deliver mail to the more than 161 million addresses we serve every day. “
Effects on employees resulting from these operational changes will be handled in accordance with our negotiated contractual provisions and will not result in employee dismissals.
When fully implemented, the Postal Service’s 10-year plan reverses a projected loss of $ 160 billion over the next decade. The plan will fuel cash flow and savings to generate $ 40 billion in capital investments over the next 10 years – including $ 20 billion in USPS’s mail and parcel processing network, facility modernization, and new acquisitions Processing equipment.
The mail volume has decreased by more than 39 billion items or 23 percent in the last 10 years and continues to decline. First-class mail is down 27 percent, and first-class individual items – letters with postage stamps – are down 41 percent over the same period.
The postal service has a nationwide network of mail processing facilities that process and sort nearly 430 million items and parcels to 161.4 million addresses at least six days a week. In 2020, the Postal Service delivered more than 129.2 billion mail and parcels to customers in all states and territories, counties, cities, towns, and rural areas in the country.
For more information on the USPS 10 Year Plan, visit usps.com/deliveringforamerica.
