BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — Christmas is almost here and things are in high gear at the Fort Point Channel post office in Boston, where 2 million pieces of mail are currently being processed a day.
Ahead of the holiday, WBZ NewsRadio’s Kim Tunnicliffe took a tour of the automated mail sorting center.
The automated sorting machine scans the bar codes on each piece of mail, and then sends them to 300 different chutes that represent different towns and zip codes.
Michael Rakes, District Manager for the Postal Service's Greater Boston District, said mail is fed into the machine manually before high tech takes over.
“The mail gets fed on this end of the machine. It’s going toward a series of reader mechanisms that will direct it. It actually takes a picture of each address and sends it to the appropriate bin for delivery,” Rakes said.
Monday Dec. 16 is expected to be the busiest day of the year for the post office.
About 500 employees work in the very busy sort center, often working between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
But it’s not just high volumes of letters and cards.
“This is where we process over 200,000 thousand packages on a day-to-day base for the next two weeks,” Rakes said. “It will then increase over the course of the next couple of days. Monday we’re expecting to probably do close to 300,000.”
WBZ NewsRadio's Kim Tunnicliffe (@KimWBZ) reports
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