The U.S. Postal Service, which had braced itself Friday for an onslaught of packages in the event of a strike at United Parcel Service, got a reprieve when the Teamsters union agreed to postpone the walkout.

“We saw package volume increase 10 percent on Thursday, and it’s likely to be more than that today (Friday),” said Terry Toole, supervisor of administration at the post office in Bangor.

The Bangor Post Office had received authorization to hire temporary workers to help meet the demand for parcel delivery, according to Toole. The Postal Service also planned to open a special receiving station at the new Brewer Post Office to handle packages.

“We were pretty well geared up for it,” Toole said. “But it (the effect of the strike on consumers) would depend on the package volume we got, and how long the strike lasted. …The last time UPS went on strike, it was a monumental problem for us.”

The response of Maine businesses to the possible strike varied widely. Jim Whitty, warehouse operations manager at N.H. Bragg & Sons, said UPS handles most of the 150 packages his company ships each day.

“We gave our customers an option,” said Whitty. “If they elected not to have us ship by UPS on Friday, we sent packages by parcel post (through the Postal Service.)”

If a strike had started this weekend, said Whitty, it could have taken two or three days for UPS managers to deliver packages already in the system.

“But our feeling is that, if parcel post got a large amount of packages, it wouldn’t be any better than UPS,” he said.

N.H. Bragg serves many widely-separated customers in the northern two-thirds of the state, Whitty said. That makes it uneconomical for the company to deliver its own packages.

In addition to the Postal Service, Whitty expected to rely more heavily on Federal Express and local delivery companies.

The NEWS was unable to find out if Federal Express had made preparations for the possible UPS strike; its toll-free telephone number was busy all afternoon on Friday.

L.L. Bean Inc. also expected to rely on the Postal Service and Federal Express to handle its tremendous volume of mail orders.

“For the last week, we’ve been advising catalog customers east of the Mississippi that we will ship their packages parcel post,” said Catharine Hartnett, a spokeswoman for the Freeport retailer. “We wouldn’t want packages stuck in the pipeline.”

On Friday, L.L. Bean began to tell customers throughout the country that orders would probably be delayed if UPS workers walked off their jobs.