(October 3, 2014) GREENSBORO, NC — How many miles do USPS mail carriers and truck drivers cover in a year? 3.2 Billion! Over 212,000 vehicles are used to make deliveries!

But before the mail can be shipped – it’s gotta be organized and that’s where this week’s Kids Want To Know question comes into play.

“Hi, my name is Darrell and I want to know how the Post office sorts and delivers all that mail.”

We checked in with our friends at a Greensboro Post Office to show us how it all works behind the scenes.

“A post office like this will do tens of thousands a day and each route will get maybe a thousand pieces, give or take a few,” explains Carl Walton. “About 80% of that mail, it comes to the post office here already sorted to be delivered. Everyday, well, it can be anywhere between 3 to 3 feet of letters and maybe 5 feet of um flats or magazines. I pull that mail, my letters and my magazines, and then i come directly to my case and i begin casing them inside of the slots based on the address we deliver it to.”

It’s actually very amazing to find out, to learn, what 49 cents for one letter can do, but it actually allows a letter to enter a system at any point in the country and go through that system. It gets sorted a number of times using that zip code to get to its destination in 2, 3, or four days – in any part of the country and some parts of the world.

“To the average person, it’s probably a miracle that it can get from one place to another like it does, organized like it is, for that amount of time.”

via From Your House To Grandma’s. How Mail Gets Sorted & Delivered.