Christmas parcel deliveries reach record high
Some 18.7 million packages made it under the Christmas tree in time according to the Swiss postal service. This amounts to an 8.8% increase from 2018 in the volume of parcels processed in the month before Christmas – a new record.
Swiss Post released its holiday figuresExternal link on Thursday, indicating that the period from November 25 to December 24 was another record-breaking holiday season. The Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping campaignsExternal link played a big part in the boom, with 15% more packages processed in the last week of November than the previous year.
On the peak days in the week before Christmas, postal workers delivered around a million packages per day, breaking a record on December 17. Postal workers also delivered an average of 16 million letters a day. Some 106,000 small packages were from abroad, over two-thirds of which were from Asia.
The state-owned postal service has been investing heavily in improving automation and its parcel processing capacity, including a new regional centre in Italian-speaking Ticino. Conveyer belts in five postal centres operated without interruption during the pre-holiday period.
Swiss Post changed its method for counting packages this year based on volume rather than “sorting actions”. As a result, the 25 million packages processed in 2018 during the holidays correspond to an effective volume of approximately 17 million packages.
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