Or a big mailing firm might pull a tractor trailer up to a big sorting and bulk-distribution center. You can drop a letter in a corner mailbox, bring it to the counter hand it to a clerk or leave it in your own mailbox for the carrier. The first stage is something that’s called acceptance-the process of the postal service taking possession of your mail and bringing it into the system. What are the automated processes that a letter goes through in today’s mail system? Scientific American spoke with Piazza about how mail-sorting machines work and why they are so crucial to today’s postal service. Of course, this process goes much faster than it did when a sorter was “a person standing in front of an enormous wall of cubbyholes, reading the address and putting it in the right box for the right city,” he adds. Its equipment can postmark and sort up to tens of thousands of pieces of mail per hour, performing what is “essentially a mechanized and automated version of the same process that was done in the 19th century,” says Daniel Piazza, chief curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. The situation, coming just ahead of a general election in which coronavirus precautions will lead many Americans to vote by mail, could potentially affect the outcome: the USPS has announced that it may not be able to deliver mail-in ballots to voters on time if they are requested later than 15 days before the election.Īutomated machines such as the ones being decommissioned greatly speed up the mail-sorting process for the USPS, which delivers what amounts to roughly half the world’s mail. The move also coincided with new USPS cost-cutting measures-instituted by Louis DeJoy, a former Republican Party fundraiser whom President Donald Trump appointed postmaster general earlier this year-which have been blamed for mail backlogs and delayed deliveries.
Although a few such machines are normally replaced each year because of wear and tear, this mass removal would involve a significant percentage of the more than 8,500 pieces of automated processing equipment that the USPS uses nationwide.
Postal Service over the agency’s plans to decommission 671 mail-sorting machines at facilities across the country. This summer the American Postal Workers Union filed a grievance against the U.S.
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