U.S. Postal Service deliverers are in some respects so much like law-enforcement officers and soldiers. They work in all kinds of weather, frequently outdoors, and they are so often taken for granted.
Besides enduring nasty bouts of weather – blazing hot, bitterly cold, windy, wet, slippery – mail carriers are also subject sometimes to ankle-biting pets and now and then crabby, hard-to-please customers.
Like police officers or deputies, mail carriers perform their jobs without whining or complaints, to the very best of their abilities. There may be some exceptions, a bad apple in the barrel here or there, but statistics alone show how superbly the U.S. Postal Service and its employees perform their jobs.
Just between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, the busiest mail period of the year, postal carriers in the nation deliver an astonishing number of packages – 600 million, to be exact. It has grown so fast, that number of packages, that some post offices have had to start Sunday deliveries during those times of the year.
Here are some other mind-boggling statistics:
All told, the U.S. Postal Service handles 155.4 billion pieces of mail every year. The service generates $67.8 billion in annual revenue (that includes zero – repeat zero – tax dollars); it has nearly a half-million employees; and 948.7 million customer visits to post offices.
The U.S. Postal Service competes with UPS and FedEx, but the two also collaborate at times. Because of the postal service’s universal network of delivery addresses virtually anywhere and everywhere in the nation, UPS and FedEx sometimes pays the service to deliver hundreds of millions of ground packages to the residences in the service’s huge expansive areas.
Most people would be surprised the U.S. Postal Service does not have as its motto the following words: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Those words were written by historian Herodotus in ancient Greece, long before the great Ben Franklin initiated this nation’s postal service.
But, official U.S. Postal Service motto or not, those words perfectly fit our excellent, dedicated mail carriers.
Next time you see one, take a moment to thank them for their service, just as you would a soldier or a law-enforcement officer.
