Shipping it Off
So the bacon was packed, the shipping labels printed, the postage affixed, the boxes sealed. Now what? We had a bunch of orders going out on a daily basis and none of us wanted to wait in line at the post office. Here comes another bonus of the USPS: drop-off boxes.
With pre-printed postage there is a paper trail that reveals who is sending the package. This means the post office will let you drop off the boxes without standing in line. They have these great self-serve stations that you just drop the packages into, and off you go. They look like a giant aluminum monster with a steel mouth. You lower the handle, throw a few boxes in, and lift the handle. Clunk. The boxes fall to the bottom. (During the holiday season we filled up three of these in a row and pretty much pissed off everyone in the post office, on both sides of the counter.)
Scott lived close to a large post office (one hop to the regional station), so once a day Kami would good-naturedly load up her van with boxes filled with bacony goodness and drop it all off at the PO. Later on, when we had office space even closer to the regional hub, we scheduled next-day pickup from our mail carrier. He wasn’t psyched about having to carry all of those boxes of bacon, but we kept him happy with a few extra packages for himself.