The United States Postal Service assures local delivery of first-class mail should take between one and three days. Even if the destination is just across town, it may take a few days for the letter to arrive.
Sending Mail Within the Same City The USPS no longer delivers overnight delivery on first-class mail, so even if one mails a letter to a destination just a few streets away, it still might not arrive there for up to three days. No matter how close the intended destination is, the sender can’t be sure of when it will arrive, unless he or she wants to pay extra for package tracking. However, the USPS does indicate that first-class mail consisting of a single component, such as a letter or check, for example, will generally take two or three days pretty much anywhere.
Transmission of Mail Delivering mail includes considerably more than just just directing it to the exact destination, which is why even mail headed for the next street over could take a few days to get there. The time it takes for mail to be delivered increases by one day if it is left in a box overnight before being processed. Once mail is retrieved, it goes through several further procedures before arriving at its destination. For starters, mail is sorted by kind, such as packages and letters, and then placed such that the addresses face the same way. It’s then mailed and imprinted with numerous fluorescent bars before being sprayed with a bar code. Following this, the mail is separated into piles based on the recipient’s zip code and delivered to a central facility for processing. There, it undergoes a second round of sorting before being forwarded to the right post office.
Determining Mail Delivery Timeline While it may seem like estimating when mail will arrive requires a lot of guesswork, the USPS does give customers a means to estimate the most likely arrival date. The USPS provides a delivery map that customers can use to estimate when their mail will arrive based on the agency’s service standards. The time it takes for an item to arrive depends on the shipping method used and whether it is being sent first-class or regular mail from the sender’s zip code. Customers of the United States Postal Service can use these two pieces of information to more accurately predict when their letter will arrive.
Timeliness of the Mail The USPS may not offer overnight delivery of first-class mail like it did in the past, but that doesn’t imply that mail sent to a destination in the same city will take the entire three days to get there. Mail within the same city typically arrives far sooner than the estimated time of delivery. In an unscientific test conducted in 2009, the New York Daily News found that no matter what speed of mail service was used, letters sent from Manhattan to Brooklyn typically arrived in Brooklyn one day later. Even though there are various different ways to send mail, the speed with which it arrives is not always guaranteed, especially for local or short-distance shipments.
