Montana Post Offices ready to deliver again for the holidays

lead nation 21st time in on-time local First Class Mail delivery

Nutcraker stamps BILLINGS, MT — With the holidays coming up, there may be no better place to mail your holiday cards and letters stamped with the new Holiday Nutcrackers Stamps (pictured), than from the great Big Sky state of Montana. For a record 21st time, Post Offices in Montana have tied or led the nation with the highest quarterly score in local on-time First-Class Mail delivery.

Montana Post Offices’ 98 percent on-time score tied with two other postal geographic districts — Northern Virginia and the Mid-Carolinas Postal Districts — out of 80 postal geographic districts nationwide for the nation’s highest score in the fourth quarter. On-time mail service was audited during the fourth quarter period covering July 1 to Sept. 30, 2008.

Nationwide, IBM Global Business Services conducts the quarterly audits of First Class mail on-time delivery performance for the U.S. Postal Service. IBM has anonymous mailers who drop unidentifiable First-Class mail pieces of all sizes and shapes into the mail system daily.

IBM audits the delivery results of those mail pieces covering particular ZIP Codes within each of the 80 postal districts nationwide. The process measures First-Class Mail from the time it is deposited into a local collection box until it is delivered to its destination.

“I want to thank all of our dedicated Montana postal employees for their great service but I also want to thank all of our hundreds of thousands of loyal Montana postal customers for their tremendous support of the U.S. Mail,” says Big Sky District Manager John DiPeri, who oversees postal operations throughout the state.

“We wish them the best this holiday season. We hope that Montana residents continue to mail with us more than ever, and that they use the Postal Service as their package shipper not just for the holidays, but every day throughout the year.”

Montana has 324 Post Offices and 2,200 postal employees. They process and deliver an average 2.3 million pieces of mail per day to more than 550,000 Montana addresses and to a delivery area of over 147,000 square miles — the fourth largest state in the U.S.

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An independent federal agency, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that visits every address in the nation — 146 million homes and businesses. It has 37,000 retail locations and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to pay for operating expenses, not tax dollars. The Postal Service has annual revenues of $75 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail.