By Lauren Wanko
Correspondent
Before billions of letters and packages land in mailboxes throughout the country, many of those pieces start at the United States Postal Service Trenton Processing and Distribution Center, where holiday cards and gifts are now piling in.
Is this the busiest time of year for Plant Manager Russ Herrick?
“Absolutely, this is what we work for. This is our busy season. All postal employees get geared up for this. We plan months ahead, we get our machinery, get our plans in place and we just can’t wait for these two weeks to happen because this is what we do for a living,” said Herrick.
The Postal Service is projecting about 16 billion total pieces of mail and packages will be delivered between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. Average daily volume is 508 million. During the holidays, that spikes to 525 million. Herrick says his facility handles 6 million to 7 million letters daily. After a customer drops a letter into the mailbox, it’s loaded into a machine. Then, the letter gets what’s called “canceled with a Trenton Postmark.”
“The letters get canceled, gets an identification on the stamped piece so we can track that and know what it is. It also is a revenue process. By canceling that stamp it means we earned the money for that stamp being collected,” said Operations Manager Lafayette Cooper.
As the mail heads down conveyors, it seemingly flies through machinery in seconds, ensuring it’s the right size to be sorted in the next piece of equipment. The mail is also tested for any bio-hazard substance. Then, it’s sorted by five digit ZIP codes and put in two categories — mail to be delivered locally and worldwide. The local mail is sorted by the overnight shift.
“Every piece of mail goes to a hold out into a container. We have 65 docks, doors where trucks are waiting, and all those trucks get loaded up and leave the facility with the mail,” said Herrick.
Those trucks are loaded and leave the plant as early as 1 a.m. There’s a similar process for packages. Items move up a conveyor and the bar code — which indicates the ZIP code — is scanned by a computer. Then, the packages are emptied into boxes based on the ZIP.
Nationally the Postal Service will process 750 million packages — up 12 percent from last year. The Trenton plant will handle nearly 3 million packages this holiday season.
“The package business right now is unbelievably heavy. I mean we haven’t seen packages like this in many years and we’re happy,” said Herrick.
Although the facility is filled with the hum of machinery, about 850 employees are on site. The operation runs 24/7, all year long.
“You still need a human element to be make sure that it’s sorted right to do quality checks,” Cooper said.
There are about 30 manual letter sorting cases. One clerk is assigned per case. Mail ends up here if it can’t be processed through the machine. There are a number of reasons why that might happen. There may be missing information, like a wrong address, it may be the wrong size or if it’s too fragile. It’s all sorted here by hand.
While lots of people prefer to wind down for the holidays, Postal Service employees will continue to work around the clock.
Are they ready for the holidays to be over after all this?
Cooper responded, “Well we enjoy the process because there’s a spike but yeah you get that relief when it’s all over!”
That is, until the next holiday.