Bills, Junkmail and Cucumbers? USPS Wants To Deliver Groceries

The U.S. Postal Service has been delivering groceries for Amazon and has decided it wants to do a lot more. The agency this week, according to The Wall Street Journal, asked the Postal Regulatory Commission for permission for a 2-year test of the plan in multiple geographies.

In the filing, which follows a 60-day-trial with Amazon in San Francisco, “the Postal Service said the expanded test could bring in revenue of more than $10 million a year for the cash-strapped agency. It said it is hoping to develop ‘a long-term, scalable solution to enable expansion of customized delivery to additional major metropolitan markets across the nation,'” according to the report.

The postal people are delivering about 160 totes of groceries each day to 38 San Francisco-area ZIP Codes between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. Each address receives an average of between one and four totes, which resemble insulated book bags, the story said.

“Amazon drops off the bags, ‘some of which are chilled or include freezer packs,’ at local post offices between 1:30 a.m. and 2:30 a.m., the filing said. Postal Service employees map out delivery routes, then manually sort and load the bags onto trucks. Letter carriers use iPhones to scan them for tracking purposes. The letter carriers wear special postal-uniform jackets that say ‘early morning delivery’ on the back, as well as baseball caps with lights along the rim, for safety reasons. They make their deliveries without ringing doorbells or knocking on doors.”