Do mail and packages move on Sundays?

[Chefguy]

@Asuka

As someone who actually not only works for the USPS but directly works with the truck drivers who move mail between facilities I can assuredly say that mail is moving 24/7. While Sundays are a lighter day compared to the other six (we get about half the trucks we get on a normal day) a lot of mail is still moving back and forth between facilities either waiting to dispatch that following Monday or is being prepped in order to be sorted Sunday night to be ready for Monday morning. Most of what I see come through are packages Sunday morning followed by a lot of letters and flats on Sunday evening.

Can you address the Amazon/USPS discussion above? Our friend told us that Amazon was taking back the package delivery end of things, but perhaps it’s a phased thing?

[kaylasdad99]

I work in a Processing and Distribution Facility, and my hours include Saturday from 9 p.m. to Sunday at 5:30 a.m. I’m not on the loading/receiving dock area, but we definitely have trucks coming in and going out.

[Ranger_Jeff]

@Me_Billy

And I assume if you were driving a semi-truck from Dallas Texas to Los Angeles, you would not suddenly stop the truck in Arizona when it became Sunday? Rather keep driving until you reached your destination.

Speaking from my personal experience, OTR drivers do NOT care what day of the week it is. Unless there’s some major sporting event taking place in a city the same day they’re driving through it. In which case you either drive a different way or adjust your timing so you miss the traffic.

Oh, and if you’re a solo driver going from Dallas to LA, it’s a minimum 3 day trip (depending on your pickup and delivery times), so in order to comply with the Hours of Service regulations, there’s at least 2 overnight stops mandated en route. Once, when I was returning from a LA trip with a load from SF to KC (I think it was), I had to take a 34 hour break to reset my hours (that pesky 70 hour rule). It worked out well for me as I took the break in SLC, where I got to meet IRL and hang out with some online friends I had known only online for several years.

[Schnitte]

@Isilder

When the trucks move on Monday-Saturday is irrelevant as to if and when the trucks roll on Sunday. Unless your town takes more than 24 hours for a truck to get across it …

How long it takes for mail to be delivered within a town is not determined by the size of the town, in the sense of the geographical distance between two points in it. It is much more dependent on whether the town has a local sorting facility or not. If it doesn’t, then all mail, local as well as national, will be trucked out of town to the sorting facility in whose area the twon lies. There it will be sorted, and the mail that is addressed to an address within that town will then be trucked back for delivery. That way, your typical mail item can travel a surprisingly long distance even for local mail. But economies of scale mean that, in spite of the cost of hauling the mail around, this is simply cheaper than running a larger number of sorting facilities.

[gotpasswords]

[QUOTE=Chefguy]
Can you address the Amazon/USPS discussion above? Our friend told us that Amazon was taking back the package delivery end of things, but perhaps it’s a phased thing?
[/QUOTE]

Amazon is assembling its own delivery service, but availability of it is regional. For the time being, in the San Francisco area, USPS brings the Sunday deliveries (as noted above, they’re working this out of regional centers, rather than your normal local post office), and on the rest of the week, UPS, USPS and Ontrac bring the goods. Another outfit called Dynamex handles the same-day deliveries.