The removal of many mail sorting machines from our post offices is a worrisome state of affairs. Each machine can sort up to 36,000 pieces of mail per hour. The machines sort letters, postcards and other mail by bar code.

One person sorting mail can’t come close to sorting that number of pieces of mail.

There must be information somewhere as to how many pieces of mail a lone person can sort in one hour, but so far I haven’t been able to find it.

Now, if we compare mail sorting to cotton picking, we can say, according to Wikipedia, that one cotton picking machine replaces 50 human cotton pickers. So 50 human cotton pickers would have to be hired to replace one cotton picking machine.

I don’t know a lot about sorting mail quickly, but I’m on solid ground with information about cotton harvesting, as we grew up on a cotton and tobacco

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