BUFFALO, N.Y. — The U.S. Postal Service has estimated it's handling 60 million packages a day this holiday season, anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 of those packages per day are being handled by the Buffalo Processing and Distribution Center.
"It's energizing this time of year," plant manager Rhonda Benton said.
The facility on William Street in Buffalo processes and distributes all the mail coming and going from Western New York, from the Pennsylvania line to Batavia.
According to Benton, the facility has already handled 1.2 million packages this season and 5,091,267 letters as of Friday afternoon. The week before Christmas is the busiest of the year.
"And we still have another week to go," she said.
Across the massive floor of the processing and distribution center are countless postal workers, manning conveyor belts filled with packages or feeding letters into sorting machines for distribution. The whir of machinery is constant.
With deadlines for the U.S. Postal Service fast approaching, Dec. 17 for retail ground and first class mail, Dec. 19 for priority, and Dec. 23 for priority mail express, Benton said Buffalo is in better shape than last year.
"Because of how advanced we are, our customers are actually seeing mail delivered a day if not two days earlier," Benton said.
Package lines are running 22 hours a day she explained. Postal workers place each package facing upward on an automated conveyer belt that weighs and scans each item. Depending on the zip code on the barcode, the machine then dumps each package into a corresponding box with the town where it will be delivered.
The operation runs like a top so any hiccup can slow down progress. That's why USPS recommends checking repurposed boxes and not shipping items in wrapping paper or brown paper, which can rip and clog up machines.
"Make sure it's durable enough for what you're packing and then look over the box to make sure there aren't any prior addresses on there or barcodes," added Mark Lawrence, a strategic communications specialist for the postal service.
Employees added that letters and greeting cards that contain non-flexible items like pencils or coins can also gum up the works. When snaked through miles and miles worth of belt-driven machinery, anything but paper can cause problems.
Of course, the biggest hiccup of all can be the weather.
Benton said Buffalo faired pretty well after last month's lake effect storm but she added they remain flexible and ready to deliver. Being ahead also doesn't hurt, the facility was able to start processing some of Saturday's mail Friday afternoon.
"We're going to make every attempt possible to deliver those packages every single day," Lawrence said.