Got Your Package On A Holiday?

The USPS works long and hard to deliver your Amazon purchases every day of the year.

Photo by Victória Kubiaki on Unsplash

You are celebrating a federal holiday in your backyard. The doorbell rings as you flip your twelfth burger patty. You open the door and find a package on your porch. You’re happy that your Amazon order came in, but who delivered it? It wasn’t UPS and also not FedEx — it was the United States Postal Service. But it’s a federal holiday, and the USPS is not a retail business. Why do they deliver on federal holidays?

The USPS has delivered mail for decades. For the longest time, specific prioritized mail got delivered on holidays and Sundays, and some cities even included package deliveries on Sunday days due to high volume.

Changes Came

Things changed when Amazon decided their packages had to be delivered every day of the week. It started in two major cities, and the USPS’s contract with Amazon would last five years. Due to its success, Amazon now reaches clients all over the country every day of the year. The only day USPS does not deliver Amazon packages is on Christmas Day.

You might be wondering why the USPS doesn’t skip the holidays. For one, they are bound by a contract. The other reason is that if they were to ignore the holidays, they would have double the load the next day.

People buy stuff on Amazon every day. I live in a military town, and base housing receives most packages per day. The volume of packages delivered to them equals the amount civilians receive. I know these things because my wife is a mail carrier for the USPS, and I listen to her daily woes.

Do people even care that their package got delivered on a Sunday or a holiday? Or are they used to this commodity? The latter seems to be the case, as the volume doesn’t decline on Sundays and holidays. We called these days “AmaSunday” because they would only deliver Amazon packages then.

The workload even increases whenever there’s a holiday sale. When is there not a holiday sale? Last month, it was the Memorial Day sale. Everybody seemed to have ordered stuff on Amazon during that weekend. Usually, my wife returns home halfway through the afternoon. That weekend she spent both…