Neither snow nor rain will prevent the U.S. Postal Service from quickly completing its designated rounds—except for the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the massive increase in mail order business, staff shortages, and budget issues.

But officials promised to add a new single-sensing parcel sorter to the Jacksonville parcel support attachment, which is part of the nation’s $20 billion mail processing system upgrade, which may mean that your holiday gifts this year can be more effective service.

They even tested some robots to deliver larger items faster.

The SIDS machine occupies the middle of the 240,000-square-foot former Samsonite luggage warehouse at 10089 N. Main St. and is now a new package support attachment for the post office. It opened in July and can handle 60,000 mails from all over the world that the post office is expected to handle every day during this holiday season.

Factory manager Michael Willard said that this is twice the local processing capacity of the postal service last year because the parcel sorter automatically sends mail to the trash cans in 136 zip codes behind him.

New stamp: San Marcos Castle in St. Augustine immortalizes on new U.S. Postal Service stamps

Wrong address: The daughter hopes someone can help recover the cremated body of her mother who was mailed to Jacksonville

The senior postal employee said: "We currently process more than 3,000 items per hour on average, and we expect to be able to use it around the clock during Christmas." "This is an extra capacity beyond our normal capacity at the facility. Last year, only on the Internet In the distribution facility, we processed 18.9 million packages from November 21 to December 31. This year we hope to process more than 21 million packages."

As the COVID-19 pandemic enters the 9th and 10th months, the 2020 holiday is a difficult year for postal services. Millions of customers are turning to mail-order food, clothing, home school supplies, prescription drugs, etc. Not going to a mail order store.

As the postal service competes with Amazon, UPS and other companies, the lack of planes and trucks to transport all these packages has also slowed the pace.

As the number of emails has soared, so has the number of employees, with 122,913 of its more than 644,000 employees being quarantined due to COVID-19 illness or exposure. Operational changes made by the postmaster to save money in a nationwide deficit-ridden system have also caused problems and delays.

Things got so bad that the post office issued a warning to customers on Twitter on December 22 that the department was delivering a record 1.1 billion packages nationwide during the 2020 holiday period.

The tweet said: “Due to the impact of Covid-19, USPS is experiencing unprecedented number growth and limited staff availability.” “We thank you for your patience and continue to work to provide you with vacation.” 

Editorial: Non-interference mail, the most popular government service

Willard said there were several reasons for the postal service's troubles last year, including the lack of capacity to handle the 40% increase in volume. The lack of planes to transport them out, leaving packages behind, online merchandise transportation alone increased by 48%.

"We don't have all the extra square feet in our annex, nor the additional equipment," he said. 

Now, the postal service has made capital improvements to its retail and delivery network across the country, including upgrades to lobby space and the design of a new post truck that will be launched soon. Willard said it has also added approximately 2 million square feet of processing center facilities in Florida, such as the North Avenue annex.

There are also 122 new parcel sorters, such as the one in Jacksonville, which can handle 2.762 million delivery points from Savannah and Waycross, Georgia, south to the areas of Ocala, Cedar Cay, and Jacksonville . Postal officials said that the sorting machine is 12 times faster than manual sorting, and can process up to 2,500 parcels and parcels per hour, with an accuracy rate of 99.95%.

The long conveyor belt starts from the scanner. Two employees put the packages on the conveyor belt, and the destination barcode on each package will be scanned within a few seconds. The conveyor belt has a system that quickly moves the package to the left or right to one of the 136 bins. They are then loaded in trucks and transported to postal facilities.

"Now I can run more mail at the same time," Willard said. "When the truck left, I took it out today. This will increase our service and ultimately increase customer satisfaction."

The system appears to be very accurate in sorting. After six hours of work on Thursday afternoon, there were only about 40 unsorted mail in its endpoint bin. In the next few months, the system will add mirrors and cameras so that the target barcode can be read from the top or bottom.

In another part of the warehouse, eight boxy autonomous robots are being tested as part of a new flexible roaming system. Packages placed on a small conveyor belt on top of each waist-high robot will be scanned for destination codes. Then the robot rolls to the trash can and slides the mail into each trash can.

"These will classify our oversized packages that are not suitable for small island developing States," Willard said. "It will be sorted to the current destination, depending on whether it is a destination office like Pooler [Ga.] or a processing facility like Atlanta... This is to increase our capacity, So that we can handle more packages."

In addition to the North Avenue ancillary facilities, the post office has leased another 45 ancillary facilities within 5 miles of existing centers across the country to deal with surges and parcel overflows. Officials said this is part of a 10-year plan to improve services and achieve financial stability, at a cost of US$40 billion.

The Jacksonville postal facility has hired approximately 300 employees in the past 18 months, most of which are permanent jobs. It is also hiring staff for the holiday peak; apply online at about.usps.com/careers.