How Long Does Priority Mail Take
How long does priority mail take?
Sitting and waiting for a package to come can be a time filled with excitement, anxiety, and uncertainty. So how long does priority mail take to get to you? How long mail takes is going to depend on many factors along the way. Many factors, indeed, though with regard to how long does priority mail take, the answer is, not long. In fact, the United States Postal Service says your package or envelope will arrive within two days. Probably? NO, they don’t say “probably”, but they might as well. They say they do not guarantee the two days, just that ‘most of the time’ packages arrive in that time period. Let’s take a look at how long does priority mail take versus how long other, regular mail takes to get to where it is going.
Mailing from coast-to-coast sounds like it would take a long time, but there are regular flights cross-country, and the sorting facilities bring mail to the middle of the coast, and then ship it straight across, east or west, depending. This means that the mail has to go first to a central sorting facility. With regular mail, the sorting facility runs like clock-work to process mail within two days. Not to deliver it, but to take the package or envelope, check the address, then put it in a pile to go to a distribution center in the appropriate, proximal zip code of its destination. That done, the mail might wait up to a day to be flown out, two days at times, then another day to be delivered by ground. With priority mail, the package is sorted the same day, if dropped off before three p.m. After that, it is going on a truck to the airport and will be flown out that day, if possible, or definitely the next. As the priority mail reaches its distribution center in the proximal zip code, it will again be sorted before any other mail in the same shipment and given ‘priority’ with regard to the order in which it is sent out for delivery.
If, for instance, you take your letter to the post-office at ten am on a Tuesday and send it out priority mail, then that letter is going to see a sorting facility that very same day where it will be processed and put in the correct bin to get to the correct truck or plane the next day, or Wednesday in our example. On Wednesday, the second full day, the letter will end up at the appropriate center for delivery the following day, or Thursday in the example. So, take the letter in Tuesday morning, have it in the hands of its recipient by around noon on Thursday. That is with all things being equal, no holidays interfering, and a post-man who does not lose the package! The rest of the mail in that delivery might be held up if the load of mail is great enough, and be sorted a day or even two days after priority mail. So, if you care to have your mail delivered the same week it is sent, priority mail is a good bet.
