USPS package volume

That a country's pet-food bill and its postal package count should rise in unison is the kind of small cosmic rhyme that suggests the mail, somehow, contains kibble. It does, occasionally. More often, it contains everything else. The dog, either way, is waiting.

Both surged in 2020 for the same lockdown reason. USPS package volume jumped sharply as covid turned every household into a mail-order customer, with Amazon and chewy.com deliveries arriving in record numbers, while pet food sales boomed on the pandemic pet adoption wave. Some of those packages were literally pet food; the rest were everything else a locked-down household couldn't go out and buy.

So the correlation is a small portrait of 2020 logistics: the mailbox and the food bowl, filled by the same truck. Both arrived daily. Neither was optional.