USPS busiest week starts Dec 15: swap delivery clips for pickup

USPS said the week of December 15, 2025 was expected to be the busiest of the year, and that post offices close on December 25 and January 1. For a seller, the practical point is that clips promising delivery have a shelf life, and the clips that replace them should be ready before it ends. Cutting a pickup or digital-gift clip from existing footage costs $0.22 on Sume: a $0.02 trim and a $0.20 caption job.

What USPS reported

The December 10, 2025 release is about readiness, and it carries a few figures that matter for planning. The numbers below describe USPS's own operations, not your parcels, so use them for timing only.

Two clip sets, two time windows

Before the cut-off dates, run clips that promise delivery. After them, retire those clips and run the ones that do not depend on a carrier. A shopper who sees "order by the 17th" on the 19th loses trust in everything else you publish.

The replacement set is small. One clip for in-store or curbside pickup with the hours. One clip for a digital gift, if you sell one. One clip for a gift card or a voucher. Each is 8 to 12 seconds and can come from footage you already have.

Cut and caption from the archive

Take a base recording from the shop floor or the pickup counter and cut the clip with video trim. Trim reads one imported file and needs start plus either end or duration.

Burn the pickup hours with video captions using cues. The caption job takes text, start and end for each card, so the hours are exactly what you wrote. If a location closes early on one day, make that location its own cue set.

Schedule it in October

Build the pickup set in October, when you are not under time pressure, and store the files. Your ad platform's scheduling can switch clips on a date, so nothing needs to be uploaded the week USPS is busiest.

Also record your own last day for orders, which can differ from the USPS date, and keep it consistent across the site, email and clips. If any of the three disagrees, shoppers trust the earliest date and blame you for the others.

Before you publish

Sume tools read media from your workspace, so import the recording first with POST /v1/media-imports and use the returned media.sume.com URL as the trim source. A trim needs start plus exactly one of end or duration, and precision defaults to exact, which lands on the frame you wrote down.

Captions with cues take your text with start and end seconds and skip speech-to-text, so a clip with no speech never hits caption_no_speech. A caption job covers a video up to 60 seconds, which is why each clip here stays well under that.