Santa Claus may have his elves hustling to fill orders in the workshop at the North Pole, but for the millions of Americans doing their holiday shopping online, there’s an even more dedicated crew working in overdrive to ensure packages arrive intact and on time: the United States Postal Service (USPS).
Each year, the USPS delivers about 800 million packages across the nation during the holiday period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Nationwide, that means thousands of additional employees are on hand to work with new technology like package-sorting machines to get millions of parcels out for delivery every day.
At Santa Barbara’s Mail Processing and Distribution Center — a nondescript beige and green facility tucked off of Storke Road in Goleta — more than 200 employees are buzzing around, sorting letters and packages piled into large bins and loaded into trucks to make their way to mailboxes and doorways across the county.