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Robots that deliver

Humans sort mail better but machines do it many times faster. So guess who's getting the job?

By LANE DEGREGORY
Published December 15, 2006

Postal employees check and correct addresses on mail at the Remote Encoding Center in Tampa, one of only 11 such centers left across the country. With advancing technology, fewer addresses are unreadable and machines can do most of the work, so fewer employees are needed. The center will close in March.
	[Times photos: Bob Croslin]

ADVERTISEMENT About 43-million pieces of mail are processed each day at a distribution center near the Tampa airport, mostly by machine. Four robots help sort letters.

TAMPA

In an industrial park near the state fairgrounds, in a long, low-ceilinged office, hundreds of people sit in small cubicles, typing numbers, trying to rescue wayward letters.

It's so quiet you can hear the click-clack of their keyboards.

They're not allowed to talk. There's no time.

Images of envelopes fly across their computer screens: 1,000 every hour. Power bills, bank statements, Christmas cards.

Something is wrong with each one. Grandmom forgot to put a ZIP code on that birthday card. A child's handwriting is crooked.

The computerized scanner that sorts mail couldn't read the address, so it beamed a photo of the envelope here, to the Remote Encoding Center - one of the last places where people actually look at addresses.

"The human eye can read more than a machine," says David Foster, who helped open the Tampa office in 1995. One of 11 encoding centers in the country, it processes mail from all over Florida, from Atlanta and Alabama. "We get the worst of the worst here," Foster says. "A lot of kids' mail, Santa letters, all that stuff."

Foster oversees three shifts of employees who work around the clock: 429 people. Each day, they save more than 250,000 pieces of mail from ending up in postal purgatory: the dead letter office.

Most of them are about to lose their jobs.

Diminishing returns

In this age of e-mail and instant communication, of cell phones and text messages, the holiday season is the one time of year people still think of the post office.

After you drop that card in the mailbox, it winds its way to a distribution center near the Tampa airport, where it passes through a tangled web of handlers.

Most of them, now, are machines.

Less than a lifetime ago, every letter, every package mailed in the United States was sorted by human beings. They knew Trinton, NJ was Trenton. They could decipher crayoned scrawl.

Larry Young, who has worked for the postal service for 29 years, remembers sitting at a "letter sorting machine" in the 1970s. Envelopes would roll by on a conveyor belt and he would look at the address, then key on a three-digit code to help route it. In one hour, 17 people processed 40,000 envelopes.

Now, with the help of one other worker and an optical scanner, Young can move 20,000 pieces of mail an hour.

With so many people e-mailing, fewer folks are writing letters. Last year, for the first time, the postal service saw more business mail than personal correspondence. Most business mail is preprinted, or the address is typed. So fewer pieces of mail are rejected by the scanners.

Machines are able to read about 95 percent of what comes in. The rest is sent, via computer image, to Remote Encoding Centers. Where human beings still work.

Displaced by technology

In 1995, when the Tampa center opened, the postal service had 54 encoding sites across the country. Soon, there will be 10.

The Tampa center is closing in March.

For years, workers have known this was coming. They were warned: The job is only temporary. Of the 429 employees at the center, only 103 are permanent. Many of them have been offered other jobs.

"Technology has evolved to the point that, though people are better at deciphering hand-written addresses, there just aren't many of those anymore," Foster says. He's moving to Chattanooga, Tenn., to work in one of the few remaining encoding centers, but realizes that, too, might be shut down.

A decade ago, images of more than 1-million pieces of mail a day rolled into the Tampa center. Today, the volume is barely one-third of that. And though workers are able to process 86 percent of what comes in, "there just isn't the need for us anymore," Foster says.

"Machines are more efficient. Everything's changing. It's crazy," he says, shaking his head. "Have you seen what's going on over at the distribution center?"

No need for holiday help

In a windowless warehouse near the Tampa airport, in a long, vaulted room, more than 1,000 workers navigate a maze of machines, rolling carts of letters, trying to tame a river of mail. It's so loud you can barely hear the Christmas carols blasting from the speakers. Motors whir, metal carts rattle across the concrete floor.

The mail comes in on planes and trucks. The Tampa facility sorts 43-million pieces a day. Mail for St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Lakeland and Fort Myers all flow through the cavernous warehouse.

"Over the last couple of years, the landscape in here has really changed," says Gary Sawtelle, the postal service's Tampa spokesman. He's touring the Tampa Processing and Distribution Center, checking out some new equipment. "If it's blue," he says, "it's new."

Looking across acres of machines, more than 70 percent of the equipment appears to be blue: blue machines that slide mail from piles into single layers so it can be scanned; blue machines that recognize the luminescence of stamps, to know if they're real; blue machines that test for seven different hazardous substances. And all around, towering two stories overhead, blue conveyor ramps spiral between the machines, twisting envelopes into the next slot, then the next and the next.

"We used to have people pushing all that mail in carts, moving it where it needed to be sorted," Sawtelle says, sounding amazed. "Now the freight elevator's never even used. Conveyor belts move most of the mail. Along with the new robots."

Last month, the Tampa distribution center installed four new robots that help sort trays of letters. The robots, which look like caged air-conditioning handlers, can process 18,000 trays a day. "They don't get sick, they don't need breaks, they can work 24/7 and never complain," Sawtelle says.

Mail carriers used to have to slot their own routes - put letters in the order they would deliver them. For some carriers, that could take two hours a day. "These robots do that all for them," Sawtelle says.

Packages are another story. They're sorted by two machines in an Ybor City warehouse. Each Automated Package Processing System is longer than a football field and covers 47,000 square feet. They weigh, scan and sort every package.

This is the first year, Sawtelle says, that the postal service hasn't had to hire extra help for the holidays. "No need," he says. "Not with all these new machines."

BY THE NUMBERS

95 Percent of mail that optical scanners can read

86 Percent of mail that scanners can't read that humans wind up resolving

1,000 Images per hour that workers at the Remote Encoding Center (REC) process

300,000 Pieces of mail that come into the REC every day

7,150 Keystrokes per hour required of REC workers

429 Workers at the Tampa REC

54 RECs the postal service used a decade ago

10 RECs after March 2007

1,500 Workers at the Tampa distribution center

12 People who were replaced by one new robot at the Tampa distribution center

[Last modified December 14, 2006, 11:16:13]