‘Not your grandparents’ post office:’ The future USPS being tested in California

From the outside, Chula Vista’s Third Avenue post office looks exactly as it has for decades, with its sand-toned column rows and opaque windows.

It’s easy to miss, even from the lobby, that the 56,500-square-foot facility has undergone a major facelift.

Step inside its processing floor and you’ll get a glimpse of the future of the U.S. Postal Service.

“This is not your grandparents’ post office anymore,” said Mayra Elena, a customer relations coordinator at the South County site. “The post office is evolving.”

Behind her were a handful of coworkers enjoying small talk as they laid packages on a conveyor belt and others sipped coffee waiting for the mail carriers to arrive just before their 8 a.m. shift on a recent Thursday.

The typical, early-morning shift of manually scanning and sorting thousands of pieces mail by ZIP code in time to load them up for delivery is now set at a more favorable pace.

“It used to be way more stressful, especially during the holiday season,” said Jacqueline Arias, a distribution clerk. “But right now, it’s only 8 a.m. and we are almost done, when before we used to sometimes finish until 9 a.m.”

It’s all thanks to technology.

At the center of the floor is a large conveyor belt that has already boosted processing by 15 percent since it came online in September. The Chula Vista Sorting and Delivery Center, as it’s now called, is processing an average of 3,100 packages an hour or up to 18,000 a day for three ZIP codes that cover most of Chula Vista and Imperial Beach: 91910, 91911, 91932.

Employees were accustomed to a less ergonomic routine, they said: unloading cages full of packages, bending over to pick them up and carrying them over to the correct area for delivery.

Now, workers are loading mail pieces onto the long conveyor belt, which scans each piece and identifies the bin it has to release it to. From there, bins are routed for delivery. This also gives workers more time to check their large digital screens for errors, such as poor-quality labels on packages.

“It doesn’t take away from the human component,” said Elena. “You still need a clerk to sort things if (the conveyor belt) can’t scan it, if a mail piece falls off, to make sure it’s rerouted if needed. It’s just that now everything gets done a lot faster, more efficiently.”

The processing floor has also been reorganized to have designated, labeled stations for letter carriers to prep for their routes, for supervisors to better communicate orders of the day and to accommodate mail carriers from Imperial Beach. Each mail carrier also uses upgraded scanners that look like smartphones and are less clunky to carry around. They also have improved GPS systems and are user-friendly for timekeeping.

Besides infrastructure upgrades, the facility appears more modern and lively. There’s brighter lighting, fresh paint, new flooring in the restrooms, improved workstations for floor supervisors and even an upgraded lunchroom with more seating and refrigerators.

As the USPS swaps its carrier vehicles for electric ones, the Chula Vista facility is expected to eventually accommodate electric vehicle charging stations.

All these changes are part of the USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s massive 10-year effort to modernize its delivery network nationwide. The Chula Vista Sorting and Delivery Center is among the first in the country and the first in San Diego County to come online.

The $40 billion plan, now in its third year, is aimed at better positioning the agency to compete in the package business against competitors like UPS and Amazon, which last year opened a 550,000-square-foot sorting facility in Otay Mesa that can process 18,000 packages an hour with the help of robots. The USPS plan also is intended to avoid $160 billion in losses over the next decade as fewer people send first-class mail.

Dubbed “Delivering for America,” the strategy involves raising prices, reducing post office hours, adding more than 60,000 electric vehicles to the agency’s fleet and opening or converting post offices into new sorting and delivery centers. The Postal Service has opened sorting and delivery centers in Athens, Ga., Texas, New York, Florida and Massachusetts. More than 100 new locations across the nation are also being considered. Chula Vista was selected, in part, for its size to accommodate new infrastructure and its location to add 13 routes from Imperial Beach.

“This is the future of the post office,” said Postmaster Henry Roberson, who has worked for the USPS for more than 20 years. He previously served at post offices in San Diego and Imperial Beach. Now at the Third Avenue site, he oversees about 170 employees and 101 routes that cover most of Chula Vista and, recently added, Imperial Beach.

Even with technological improvements and a reorganization of the facility, operations of a post office can be stressful. But even before coming online, the Chula Vista post office heard concerns from Imperial Beach residents about the future of Imperial Beach’s only post office, an 18,000-square-foot facility the USPS leases on Donax Avenue and Emory Street

Duke Gonzalez, a Postal Service spokesperson, reiterated last month that the Imperial Beach site is not closing and that customers will not experience changes to the retail and P.O. Box operations. Customers will still be able to pick up undelivered packages.

Critics of the 10-year plan have said that the conversions will lead to inefficient routes and delays in mail deliveries. The Imperial Beach post office is about 5.5 miles southwest of the Chula Vista location.

Roberson said the key to keeping order is welcoming and adapting to change, as well as respecting others.

“Because at the end of the day, we’re all here to provide a service and we want to make sure we get it right to benefit the South Bay community,” he said.

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune.