The Bloomfield post office: busy, busy busy

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Letter deliveries are not peaking during the holiday season anymore, according to Bloomfield post office Officer-in-Charge Jason Kagle, but package deliveries more than make up for it.

“I’ll go to the dock and you look at the back of a 2-ton truck with at least 200 parcels and you cannot believe one man is going to delivery all of those,” he said earlier this week in his Municipal Plaza office. “We have very dedicated truck drivers.”

Kagle said during the year 2,000 packages are delivered each day by Bloomfield postal workers. That number more than triples at Yuletide.
“During Christmas, we get our first drop from Amazon at midnight,” he said.

The U.S. Postal Service has an agreement with Amazon to deliver its packages. Kagle said the work on deliveries start at midnight and do not stop until 7 p.m.

“We’re getting 15 pallets of packages from Amazon each day,” he said. “Ordinarily we get three to four.”
Bloomfield has three post office branches in addition to the main office at Municipal Plaza. The busiest branch is on Broad Street, in the Brookdale section of town. Kagel said that branch every day will fill an entire truck with mail.

Seventy-five people work for the postal service in Bloomfield. The eight trucks ordinarily used to service the township have been beefed up to 11 for the holidays. There are 43 mailboxes along township streets and also relay boxes. These boxes are the olive green ones.
Kagle did not have an exact count of these. They are used to store parcels and letters to be delivered.
The 11 Bloomfield trucks work out of these boxes.

The drivers are also responsible for picking up parcels being mailed. Residents making their pickup requests use the Internet to alert the post office.

“Our carriers can’t pick up returns,” Kagle said. “They have no vehicle. But sometimes an elderly person will call up and we’ll do a package pickup without them having to go to our website.

Even though package deliveries spike at this time, just one seasonal worker was hired in Bloomfield for the holidays.
“Every year it seems we do more with less,” he said. “A Christmas miracle. The work always gets done. I’ve worked in a variety of post offices. Each one works differently. A lot of things are uniform but each office has its own idiosyncrasies.”

There are not many letter to Santa Claus anymore, Kagle said, nor unusual gifts being mailed in or out of Bloomfield — no more crates of eight turtle doves. But Kagle said when he worked at the Flemington office, chickens, crickets and bees passed his way.
The bees were in a container that had a hole. So until delivery, Kagle said that package stayed outside and covered.

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