15B Pieces of Mail Will Be Delivered This Holiday Season

The U.S. Postal Service expects to deliver 15 billion pieces of mail this holiday season. Nearly 3 billion will be delivered this week alone.

Because of the enormous volume, the Postal Service says that tomorrow — Dec. 19 — is the last day to drop a card in the mail if you want it to arrive by Christmas.

Of course, it’s not just cards that get sent during the holiday season. The Postal Service expects to ship 850 million packages.^[1]

On top of that, private carriers will deliver over a billion packages. UPS expects to deliver 750 million packages, with FedEx handling 400 million more.^[2]

With so much shipping going on, there are naturally concerns about delays. To address that concern, Fortune magazine reports that "many brick and mortar retailers are encouraging customers to ship items to their local stores. Since those items are handled by different contractors, they often don’t experience the same shipping delays."^[2]

Footnotes:

1. USPS, "Postal Service is Ready to Deliver More Than 15 Billion Pieces of Cheer This Holiday Season," October 25, 2017
2. Fortune, "UPS, DHL, and Other Shippers Warn of Holiday Shipping Delays," December 13, 2017

Each weekday, Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day explores interesting and newsworthy topics at the intersection of culture, politics, and technology. Columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.

Scott Rasmussen is founder and president of the Rasmussen Media Group. He is the author of "Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System," "In Search of Self-Governance," and "The People’s Money: How Voters Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Federal Debt." Read more reports from Scott Rasmussen — Click Here Now.