The mail is secure, thanks to work of USPS

MANCHESTER — It’s the busiest time of the year for employees of the United States Postal Service, and they’ve taken steps to ensure their smooth operations remain uninhibited.

At the Mail Processing Facility, hundreds of postal workers were hard at work, receiving, processing and moving forward thousands of parcels, letters and other items on Tuesday, just a week away from the Christmas holiday.

One of those employees, Plant Manager Janie Beltran, said she’s been working there for three years but has spent a 30-year career in the USPS that’s taken her across the country from the smoldering Southwest to the frigid alpine range of Vermont and, now, back down to New Hampshire. 

Tuesday morning, Beltran said business is booming. 

“This is our most important time of the year,” she said. 

Each year she’s been plant manager in the state's Queen City, the number of packages has exceeded the year prior. Steve Doherty, corporate communication specialist for USPS, said consumer preferences and behavior seemed to change during the COVID pandemic, when online shopping took centerstage. Postal workers figured that trend might normalize or even reverse when restrictions on distancing lessened or when consumers exhibited less hesitancy with going out in public, but that hasn’t been the case.

Now, they’re doing more business than ever, largely due to an apparent affection consumers have with ordering items online. They deal with packages all year long, but the holiday season is still their time to shine. USPS is expected to deliver around 800 million packages between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day alone.

“This is kind of our time of year,” Doherty said. “What has changed a lot is the package volumes — online shopping has really taken off.”

To deal with generational change, the postal service has implemented what they call their 10-year Delivering For America Plan. It’s meant to modernize their operations, make them more efficient and, ultimately, transform the USPS into a financially and organizationally self-sustaining and high-performing entity. The plan includes changes in logistics and increasing capacity to handle higher volumes of larger parcels. 

“We needed to retool,” he said. 

There's lots of talk floating around regarding a potential move to privatize the USPS, though what that means exactly is unclear. In the meantime, Doherty said, it’s business as usual — they’re going to continue delivering mail as they’ve always done and do their best to do it well.

“We’re fairly apolitical,” Shappy said. “Our job is to deliver the mail.” 

Granite State Congressman Chris Pappas (D, NH-01), on the other hand, has communicated full-throated support for the postal service. He was the author of two recent bills, signed into law by President Joe Biden, which named Manchester-area post offices after prominent citizens in recognition of their decorated careers. 

The USPS facility at 609 Portsmouth Ave. in Greenland will henceforth be known as the Chief Michael Maloney Post Office, and another in East Derry as the Chief Edward B. Garone Post Office. 

In the meantime, the USPS mail sorting facility in Manchester has a broad mandate: any parcels or letters an individual may place in their trademark blue boxes, anywhere at any time. When a customer drops mail in those boxes or brings it to the counter at a local post office, a truck picks it up and brings it to the sorting facility in Manchester. 

Mail from other parts of the state goes to similar facilities elsewhere, such as in Nashua.

When it's received at the processing facility, scores of postal workers, working 24 hours each day, seven days a week in shifts called “tours,” sort and process the mail appropriately before it's loaded onto trucks and transported to other areas of the state or even across the country. Closer to its final destination, a parcel will be received at another processing facility — like the one in White River Junction, Vermont — and finally organized into smaller bunches and sent to local post offices, where they’ll soon be delivered by your friendly neighborhood mail carrier.

“Everything comes into here,” Shappy said. 

But it takes a small army to get any one parcel to the end point of delivery. The facility in Manchester is responsible for much of the Granite State, as far north as Jackson.

“What we do here is collect local mail and distribute it to the rest of the country,” Logistics Manager John Shappy said. 

That job is increasingly big around the holidays, and USPS generally hires temporary workers to meet the increase in business. More often now, they’ve noticed hiring increases in permanent positions, as those coming to the end of long careers — some postal employees have been on the job for 50 and 60 years — gradually retire and new postal workers are brought into the fold.

“There’s definitely some longevity there,” Doherty said. 

And Doherty had advice to customers to help postal workers do their jobs quickly and efficiently through the holiday season. He said he’d prefer to see nice, solid boxes and customers should take care to pack them correctly with an accurate zip code written legibly on the parcel. Make sure certain restricted items — like perishables, liquids, perfume, items containing lithium ion batteries, many of which can be mailed — are labeled correctly, and a clerk at the counter of a post office is aware of their contents.

USPS offers employees a pension and 401K, and new employees are able to start in a long list of different areas of the business, both inside and outside a USPS facility. Doherty, himself, began his career as a letter carrier.

“It is a nice job,” he said. “Not easy work, but it’s fulfilling.”