If you still have gifts to get in the mail to your loved ones for Christmas, you may want to act fast.
Debbie Fetterly is the Postal Service Spokesperson for the South Florida Region.
"We have a lot more customers than usual shopping online so they are shipping online, we have a lot of mail, an unprecedented volume in our post offices around the country, especially in West Palm Beach and the Miami area,” said Fetterly.
She says they start preparing in January for the holiday season, and this year has certainly been more challenging.
“We’ve hired additional employees for the season and we also have some of our career employees we’re moving around to different locations so everything is under control, we’re going to deliver the holidays for our customers,” said Fetterly. “When the pandemic hit we were impacted just like any other business. So we needed to hire some employees to supplement those of our employees who were impacted by COVID and have since recovered so we have a couple hundred employees in South Florida- we’re happy to report- they are back but in the interim we did hire more folks and we did hire more for the season.”
The recommended deadline for for first class packages and cards to arrive by Christmas is on Friday. Saturday is the deadline for priority mail, and Dec. 23 is the deadline to use priority mail express to get our gifts under the tree in time.
You can get priority mail boxes free at the post office, or you can order them online.
“I would suggest using your priority mail box rather than a cardboard box that has already been processed. It’s up to the customer, but priority boxes are free and they are easily identifiable in the mail stream,” said Fetterly.
If you don’t want to head to the post office in person, you can use the USPS Click-N-Ship option online.
“You can order stamps, you can order labels, print the labels right there, and Click-N-Ship is good because it also has a feature package pick up. If you can’t get to the post office because you are busy like all of us, you can schedule a package pick up from your regular letter carrier whenever he or she delivers mail and packages that day- you have your packages ready to go, we will pick up for free and that’s been a very popular feature,” Fetterly says.
You can schedule the pick-up within 24 hours.
If you do go to the post office and see a long line, Fetterly says it may not take as long as it appears.
“Like everywhere else we are observing what the CDC has told us, we have six feet social distancing between each customer so when you open the door the line might look long, but we have everybody separated by six feet so thats a change they’ll see,” said Fetterly. “Many of our post offices have self service kiosks if you pay with a credit card or debit card you can use one of them and you can do almost anything there that you can do at the retail counter so those are two things to look for.”
For more on shipping deadlines and online options, click here.
If you are shipping with FedEx, you can find the shipping deadlines and schedules here.