Cloquet postmaster Todd Manisto gazed at the piles of boxes - some towering over even the tallest letter carriers - stacked in carts clustered in the mailroom at the post office Monday. "This is nothing compared to yesterday," he said.

Add all the gifts and holiday cards to everything else that people started ordering online during the pandemic, and these are busy times. The Cloquet office delivered 1,695 packages on Sunday alone, Manisto said.

On Monday, they were at it again. Manisto had popped into work at 12:30 a.m. Monday to accept the first shipment of boxes from Amazon, then went ho...