You can reach anyone in the GE company in Schenectady by using the Zip Code 12345. GE internal mail would look up the person and deliver it.
There are also some individuals who have their own Zip+4 addresses. In NYC, both Walter Chronkite and Isaac Asimov had them; if you knew them (and the post office put out a directory of all Zip+4 addresses at that time, so it was easy to look up), you could reach them with just the zip.
Thank you, this is exactly the thing 
Mad magazine showed a letter a reader had sent. It had just a picture of Alfred E Neuman and the zip code, but it still got delivered.
If you mother grew up before 1963 in the US, that was pretty standard. ZIP (zoning improvement plan) codes came into usage at that time.
Here in Oz large companies and institutions have their own postcode (Oz version of zipcode). My old university was 5005, a letter addressed to Francis Vaughan, 5005 would have got to me. Luckily my name is not common. The mail office would not have been amused, but they would have delivered it.
In Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” he describes how he got to know a CIA agent called Teejay. Teejay asks Cliff to mail him his notebook. “Just mail it to Teejay, Zip Code 20505. It’ll reach me.”
I remember that. That was something like 1970. And I believe there was not even a zip code.
There was an anecdatum some years ago that Herb Caen, long-time (and now, long-deceased) columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, once received a mail that was addressed only to:
(Graphic icon on a marijuana leaf) (Graphic icon of a walking-cane)
San Francisco
Wow, I have the same combination on my luggage!
There goes all my passwords…
As a kid, I used to address my letters to:
Grandma, xxxxx, Texas
Now there is always a lot of grandmas in that town but only one "Grandma.’
We was proud little kids…
True story. Wife and I moved to Ovid, NY. Registered for a box [no home delivery] at the Post Office. Next day!!! Town population signs on the roads were changed from 559 to 561. Told friends about it and they mailed us a letter with name + zip code. It arrived two days after the postmark from Connecticut.
We later moved to Japan and the local post office not only forwarded the mail for longer than required, they kept up a letter writing exchange with us as well for the next two years. This was early 80s; some small town things were awesome.
He might have a future as a road sign translator in Wales.
One address I will always remember is for the Christian radio series “Adventures in Odyssey”: Adventures in Odyssey, Colorado Springs, CO 80995. No street address, just the name of the program/company and City/State/ZIP.
Frequently get things from nutjobs:
Things like:
El Presidente Barak
Amerika
The Queen
Britton
I assume they get there.
Also, one of the biggest “customers” each year is Santa Claus. Most postal administrations assign a code to it, the most famous being Canada’s (a place which uses alpha-numeric codes) with H0H0H0.
“Santa” and the code will get there. “Santa” alone will also get there (“there” being an office that sends a Santa reply to the kids - I believe our Canadian friends were the first to initiate this custom too). Bonus points for a) the address being in crayon, b) each letter being a different colour, and c) jackpot for the S in “Santa” being backwards. Brings a smile to jaded sorters’ faces, that does.
We have postcodes instead of zips, and their uses have gone far beyond simply sorting mail. In particular, the Insurance companies use them for assessing risk. If you live in a postcode with a bad crime rate, your insurance premiums will be more expensive.
Of course this can create problems for people who happen to live just on the wrong side of the the boundary between a low-crime area and a better one.
There was a strange story that happened in Manchester. The occupants of six houses (three semi-detached pairs) found themselves at a disadvantage to all of their neighbours. Investigation showed that when postcodes were first introduced, the manager of a PO sorting office lived in one of them, and altered the boundary to put his house (and his neighbours) into his own district. This meant that those six houses had their letters delivered by a different postman to all the rest, and that they paid higher insurance premiums for their houses and cars. Conversely they got a slightly better deal on life insurance.
And, yes. A letter addressed to Bob++, B98 xxx would almost certainly be delivered, although the house number would make it certain.
I have some old letters addressed to my Mom or her parents with just "Name, Isle of Hope, GA. that were delivered just fine.
There is one that read "House with columns, White Bluff Drive, and apparently that worked as well!
Now, granted, things have changed since 1949, but still!
Same with zip codes in the U.S., used for all sorts of non-mail geographic sorting including for insurance risk.
The suburb of Chicago that I grew up in (Norridge) is surrounded by the city proper and used to be served by two Chicago post offices, so everyone in the village had a 606xx Chicago zipcode. A couple of decades back, the community lobbied successfully for the zipcode boundaries to be redrawn so the village had one 607xx (non-Chicago) zipcode. The village didn’t get a new post office, and many people were served by the same office as previously, so this was entirely to have a non-Chicago zip code. IIRC, my car insurance premium did go down slightly. :dubious:
I’m in a mid-sized condo, so my nine-digit zip* is entirely for my building. I have no doubt a letter addressed to John Bredin, 60016-xxxx would reach me at usual speed.
*“ZIP+4” sounds odd and outdated to me, implying that the last four digits are not “really” part of the “actual” (five-digit) zip code. :smack:
I often just put the street number “425 ‘street’” and the 5 digit zip. can’t imagine they’d have any trouble getting it back to me. It might discourage some people from getting your address from old envelopes and sending you junk.
One place I lived, the power company was “Gainesville Regional Utilities”, and people would send them checks addressed to “GRU”, and just, “GRU” on the payee line.
someone started looking for boxes with the flag up a few days after GRU sent their bills out…and found quite a number of GRU checks…that they changed to their fake bank account name, Grubeck, and cashed them.
Not exactly on topic, I know.