The Mail Service
The Mail Service is an important part of our daily lives. It is a system that allows us to communicate and send letters to friends, family, colleagues, employers, clients, and customers around the world. The Postal Service is a government agency that delivers first-class mail to all addresses in the United States and connects rural communities. The service also provides a foundation for other services offered by governments, including passport services, census surveys, and receiving absentee ballots.
A national postal service is essential to a thriving economy and protects against economic concentration by offering standardized pricing. It also provides a vital public service that is free of charge to the citizens it serves. It is a complex network of facilities that includes over 250 Processing and Distribution Centers in the United States and Canada. Each center is responsible for sorting mail within its jurisdiction, typically within a radius of about 320 kilometers or 200 miles.
These centers are connected by a network of automated equipment to the rest of the Postal Service’s nationwide network. They process and deliver mail to more than 153 million addresses in the United States and over 31,000 retail locations, as well as provide a workforce of over 211,000 employees across the country.
They also operate a vast fleet of trucks and buses. These vehicles travel about 1.2 billion miles a year to deliver the mail. The processing and delivery of mail is a complex task that requires many different kinds of employees to ensure that the mail is sorted correctly. The different types of items that require attention include confidential or urgent letters, personal or private letters, business letters and a variety of other items such as stamps.
