Ages ago you’d start your day and spend 4-6 hours sorting buckets of envelopes and packages. Then organizing them in smaller batches by block/street. Then 2~4 hours running your route.
Now they have machines do pretty much all the sorting. But you still got a 8 hour shift. So it’s 7+ hours of walking instead of the old 2~4. It’s extremely physically demanding since you now have to deliver four times the mail due to the automation of part of your job.
Postal workers have takes a significant cut with the popularisation of email.
The saving grace for postal services is the rise of online stores like Amazon. They all shifted from delivering mail to delivering parcels.
They actually deliver a third of all UPS and FedEx ground packages in the US.
From speaking to a career USPS worker…
Ages ago you’d start your day and spend 4-6 hours sorting buckets of envelopes and packages. Then organizing them in smaller batches by block/street. Then 2~4 hours running your route.
Now they have machines do pretty much all the sorting. But you still got a 8 hour shift. So it’s 7+ hours of walking instead of the old 2~4. It’s extremely physically demanding since you now have to deliver four times the mail due to the automation of part of your job.