I routinely mail packages via USPS across the country to various friends and family members. Today, I mailed something off to Tennessee and it is scheduled to arrive in the morning. How does it get routed? How does the process work to get it to the destination as quickly as possible?
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Big scanning machines read the address and basically make a simple decision based on the location of the machine and the destination of the package: what is the best post office *I’m connected to* to send this package closer to the destination?
If that post office is the post office you’re currently in, like if you’re mailing an letter within your own small town, great! The machine throws it over to the sorting machine that handles individual mail routes and it goes into the bag for that route, and the letter carrier delivers it to the destination.
Much more commonly, it’s not the post office you’re currently in. So the machine looks where else it can send it…if you’re a tiny post office, that might only be to the central post office for that city. If you’re already a big city post office it might be another big city post office, or a regional sorting hub. The sorter will route your package to whatever bin is heading in the right direction. When that bin is received at the next sorter, that sorter will do the same basic logic. At some point you’ll stop going to bigger post offices and start getting distributed out to smaller ones until the package ends up at the destination sorting facility, where the machine will put it into the bag/truck/whatever for that route and it’ll get delivered.
Overnight shipping companies like FedEx or UPS mostly skip over all the intermediate levels and either turn it around at the local hub or collect everything to a very small number of mega hubs, sort it all there, then spit it back out.
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