Night shift in the Mainz letter center: Duygu Gündüz lends a hand!

Night shift in the Mainz letter center: Duygu Gündüz lends a hand!

The Deutsche Post letter center in the Hechtsheim district of Mainz is an important part of the nationwide infrastructure for letter transport. There are currently 82 such letter centers in Germany, which process around 65 million letters from 140,000 mailboxes every day, as Wikipedia) reports. The operation in the Mainz center is characterized by modern sorting systems that ensure efficient processing of shipments.

Duygu Gündüz, one of the employees, works there regularly at night, three to four times a week. Your service begins between 1:30 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. She describes working the night shift as hard, but she is satisfied with her family life and happy to have found this job two years ago. The letters are initially sorted roughly by delivery area and then in the order of subsequent delivery, which increases the efficiency of the process.

The role of letter centers

The main goal of the letter centers is to rationalize letter delivery in Germany. Before the 1990s, there were around 1,000 letter processing centers, but these were converted to modern letter centers through the “Letter 2000” concept and the introduction of five-digit postal codes. The first of these centers went into operation on August 29, 1994 in Straubing, and the last opened on December 4, 1998 in Regensburg. Since then, the letter centers have been in operation almost around the clock.

Following the latest developments, some mail centers have been closed and operations relocated to other cities. For example, on May 13, 2024, the letter center in Starnberg was closed and relocated to Munich-Germering, where three key regions are now served. The largest letter center is located in Frankfurt am Main and can process up to 5 million items per day, while the allocated capacity of the other centers varies from 450,000 to over 5 million items.

The technical requirements

The technical systems are an important part of the operational processes in the mail centers. Sorting facilities and automatic processing machines have improved significantly since the 2010s, which has also led to an increase in capacity. The Kempten letter center, for example, experienced an increase from size S to M and shows the general trend towards expanding the capacity of letter centers.

Overall, the letter center in Mainz is not only an example of modern working methods in logistics, but also an important workplace for many people in the region. Given the continuous development of these facilities, it remains to be seen which innovations will further facilitate the work of postal employees in the future.

Further information about the processes in the Mainz letter center can be found in a report from the ARD Mediathek.