If this year's compressed holiday season has you feeling like you've got 20 million things left to do, then you can relate to the challenge UPS faces on Thursday.

On what's dubbed "Peak Day" -- the busiest shipping day of the year -- UPS will deliver more than 20 million packages. That's about 230 packages delivered per second, and a 50% surge above UPS’ average volume of 13.3 million packages a day. And it's the equivalent of one package for every American child under age 5.
Yet the flurry represents just a sliver of the 300 million packages UPS will deliver this holiday season, which began with a late-arriving Thanksgiving and continues through Christmas Eve.
To accommodate the swell in volume, most locations of The UPS Store and UPS Customer Centers have extended their holiday hours, and UPS has added more than 50,000 seasonal helpers to its workforce. Nearly a dozen large jets are supplementing the fleet of about 600 aircraft in operation year-round, and the number of flights taking off each day during Peak Week will surge 45% to more than 1,300.