Millions of Christmas presents might be delivered late this year, due to backups at the US Postal Service.
It's a combination of two things -
- increased volume due to more people staying home and mailing out gifts,
- and spiking coronavirus rates that have caused over 19,000 USPS employees to call out sick so far.
Nearly 19,000 of the agency’s 644,000 workers are under quarantine after testing positive for the virus or after a close exposure, according to the American Postal Workers Union.
It's so bad that packages are stacked to the side to make a narrow pathway and some processing plants are now refusing to accept new mail shipments. The backlogs are so bad that some managers have reached out to colleagues in hopes of diverting mail shipments to nearby facilities.
Package volume is up 14% over 2019 totals and many parcels won't be arriving at their destinations until after Christmas.
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