Interesting. Personally I find a string of numbers much easier to remember than a number/letter combination.
Undoubtedly so, but what I’m trying to explain is that it will be of no consequence to human beings. Already, the machines are programmed to look for the barcode first, and only resort to looking at the postcode if the barcode isn’t there. Of course there will always be a code of some description, but the need to have one readily understandable by humans is going or gone.
You’re right, but again that’s a problem specific to the UK because of the way the addresses are set up. This might make what I’m proposing unworkable in the UK in a pure form, but a diluted one could still work. You could go the way of some European countries that have postcodes like “Prague 4”. That would cover the contingency of multiple identical placenames within the one British county, but would remove the main problem of requiring the customer to always apply a complex alpha-numeric code and to always get it right. They don’t. It’s in the interest of the post office to have addressing of mail as easy as possible for humans. They would love nothing more than having the punter just write “Mum, 31 Peachtree Grove, Newtown, Bucks” and for it to automagically get there. That’s good for their business. If you cast your mind back about fifteen or twenty years when the first generation OCR tech was introduced, the world’s various postal administrations started encouraging the use of envelopes with little orange flourescent squares for people to write the postcode in. This made life easier for the post office, not the customer, and as such was bad business practice. You’ll notice the little orange squares have now all but disappeared. There is a reason for that. They were an added imposition on the customer, and the technology has rendered them obsolete.
I certainly concede that the UK is a difficult case though, because of the addressing system in use. However, it could certainly be simplified.
If the code is to be applied to the mailpiece by humans, then it needs to be understandable by humans (like a postcode) - I can’t hand-write barcodes.
if it needs to be applied to the mailpiece by machines, then a way of accurately and concisely cross-referencing from the human-applied address to the appropriate routing/sorting code is required (like a postcode).
For mail generated by machines (bank statement runs, for example), I agree, a human-readable routing/sorting code is possibly redundant, but not all mail is generated by machines and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Again you have a valid point, but think of it this way…
Check the next, say, twenty letters you receive. How many are old fashioned correspondence, and how many are from banks and other businesses? How many are barcoded? Look for a flouro code at the bottom of the envelope on the front, or one at the back, or a black barcode above the address. I reckon most of your mail will have some or all of these.
There will always be an option to hand write and address and throw it into a pillar box. And unless there is some dramatic advancement in technology, these will often be hand sorted. As I mentioned earlier though, the fact that the vast majority of mail is machine readable will enable human sorters to quickly deal with the remainder.
It comes down to a decision on the part of the post office. The codes are obsolete from a technical viewpoint. I know this because I do it for a living, and have watched the technology change over the last sixteen years. the decision the post office has to take is is it worth the difficulty and expense of the software change and the public education campaign, or is it better to carry on? The downside of carrying on is that postcodes are, frankly, an added hassle, so why keep them if you don’t need to?
I think they will eventually go. I also think there will be glitches and public reluctance, but that will be overcome. An analogy is things like electronic banking and suburban bank branch closures. It annoyed people, but in the end most people found the new version convenient. There were some obviously very much inconvenienced by it (people without computers, etc) but that didn’t stop the banks. The same with digital TV or mobile telephony. The public will eventually adopt the change, and after a few years forget what they were complaining about. I’d say, in ten years’ time, you’d have the barcodes on your PC, and print out envelopes. For the few people that can’t or won’t, then they can still post a letter, but it might get there a day late.
What it boils down to in my mind is this…
Assuming the UK (or any other given place) had a set of entirely unique town names, then there is no need for postcodes. That’s a given. The machines can read the address. Now, if we introduce the problem of multiple names (let’s say there are eighty of the most common name in the UK), then we can have a simple two-digit code for people to write in. I’m not great at maths, but I wonder how many possible unique places there are with the current long alpha-numeric code. It seems to me to be a sledgehammer approach. Wouldn’t it be better to just write in “Newtown, Essex, 12”?
What you’re describing is exactly the system which postcodes were introduced in order to eliminate. A postal address used to include a street location, a locality, a post town, and a county. But it was still prone to errors - remembering which nearby town was Auntie Hilda’s post town could be a problem.
(a) the postcode database is a commercial concern for the Royal Mail, and (b) updating everything from websites to GPS systems would be a huge undertaking!
Interestingly, small post offices in Britain have had an increase in custom over the past couple of years. Because of eBay. Who would have predicted that ten years ago? (And how many handwritten addresses does that involve?!)
The sledgehammer approach is useful, because it ensures an address is seen to be incomplete without a postcode. How would somebody know, say, that ‘Tuddenham, Suffolk’ would need a suffix to distinguish between two places? Your system would increase the number of incomplete and possibly undeliverable addresses, for these locations (of which there’s a hell of a lot).
Yes, but as a commercial concern for the Royal Mail, it’s theirs, and they’ll keep it or change it on a commercial basis, and the third party companies that use the system will have to comply, like it or not.
When I was new to the postal system, I was told that ten per cent of postcodes od articles are incorrect. Now, I suspect that’s a bit high, but five per cent might be reasonable. My gut feel, after sixteen years in the industry, is that the number of articles that need the postcode to be actively used as a reference is something lower than five per cent.
On balance, productivity could be improved without postcodes.
So there are multiple town X’s? You can reduce the multiples dramatically by inserting the county in the address. Then, the already reduced conflict will only arise when there are identical street names. From there, it will only arise on the few items (xmas cards etc) that are unbarcoded. I maintain that the problem is negligible, regardless of how many Newtowns there may be in the UK.
But could they have predicted it two years ago, when they made the decision to close several hundred of them? :rolleyes:
Specialist services such as parcels (with the eBay effect) and priority mail are either slightly up or steady.
The core standard letter business however, is noticeably down,
And just to add to that, the custom at small post offices accounts for precisely three tenths of bgger all. The real money is in the bulk business lodgements where mail is measured in TONS, not 30p stamps.
I have to wonder if you know what the UK is actually like - some addresses - particularly rural ones in places like Newtown - are just Rose Cottage, Newtown, Hants, SOxx 1JQ. Worse still, many, many duplications of street names exist - lots of small villages have a Church Lane, a Green Lane; lots of small towns have a Market Street. It sounds to me like you’re trivialising the problem through simple misapprehension.
Sure, personal mail is a drop in the ocean, but I still think RM has invested far too much in the postcode system (you also don’t seem to fully grasp how ingrained it is now) to be able to drop it - it is the source of much non-postal revenue for RM, because they sell the database to third parties for all sorts of purposes (Streetmap.co.uk, for example, is one of their customers - you can look up a local map simply by entering a postcode).
It may not be ideal, but it’s too useful to dispense with.
Mate, not only am I a postal worker but I actually specialise in processing ex-overseas mail, and the largest proportion of that by far in this country is ex-UK mail. I could probably get a job as a sorter in the UK without any training, I’m that close to it. I am extremely familiar with UK addressing protocols. Trust me, I may be on the other side of the world, but I live and breathe this stuff. I possibly handle more UK mail than I do Australian. I do it to put food on my table. It’s my job, and I understand it backwards.
As I said several times earlier, I concede there is a problem in the UK with adopting what I am suggesting.
But there are two points I wish to make:
1. The Royal Mail’s commercial database is, in the end, one of addresses. Postcodes are a means to an end only. They are not so desperately important. As long as every address in the UK can be isolated, and it can be done with a simpler system, then why not do it with a simpler system? With or without postcodes, the database retains its intrinsic value.
2. Once again if, as GorillaMan has shown us, we have a system that allows for a potential 27 million unique codes, why do we need that many if we’re just trying to isolate a handful of identical town names? The use of postal codes introduces a significant error factor, and I believe that outweighs the error factor of not having them at all. You guys don’t seem to be understanding that the current technology reads the entire address including the street, and there’s no way in hell that 27 million British addresses are duplicates of other addresses.
Postal codes are fifty years old. The way mail is sorted these days has scant relation to the way it was sorted then. These codes are a legacy system. They still work, but I think a lot of people in this thread are not understanding how little they work. The sorting machines don’t even read the things most of the time.
I did not mean to cause offence, and I understand and appreciate your expertise within the postal system; my thrust was more to the point that you seemed to be waving away the complexities of not the British postal system itself, but the geography, layout and naming of British homes/streets/towns etc
No worries. I’m sorry if I reacted too strongly.
What I am proposing will work pretty much perfectly for the Australian system (by a quirk of history, rather than good planning, our system is very suited to it), and will work less well in the US, and less well again in the UK - but it will still work.
The postal code concept has served us well, but now the barcodes are making them obsolete, and it’s uncertain how long the postal administrations will retain them for the use of occasional mailers.
Australia Post haven’t done themselves any favours by recently deciding they would no longer carry “firearm parts”.
Because of the way couriers charge (it’s basically the same cost to send an entire rifle as it is to send a bolt on its own), it’s getting bloody hard to get parts shipped in from overseas- and even other parts of Australia, for that matter.
TheLoadedDog, I don’t suppose you know what Australia Post considers a “firearm part” at all, do you? (I know the decisions of management have nothing at all to do with you, but if you happen to be talking to anyone in charge, feel free to tell them they’ve inconvenienced a lot of people)
While we’re here, what’s to stop me simply putting “Postage Paid Australia” on my letters where the stamp should be and mailing them? (Besides the obvious breach of Commonwealth Law that would invariably involve…)
Just had a look at the link. That’s bloody stupid, and please accept my apologies on behalf of my fucked up employer. I’ll try and look into it for you. I might have a contact in QLD you can talk to. The state manager up there is a bloke by the name of Bill Wilson. He’s quite reasonable, and he has his finger on the pulse. He knows me (and will probably run screaming if you mention my name).
This is a fairly common question. The answer is very simply, if you think about it…
You still have to post the thing.
A post office clerk will tell you “on yer bike”, and if it goes into a red pillar box on the street, the bags inside are taken to a mail sorting facility, and when they’re opened your letter will be removed because that mail hasn’t yet entered the general processing stream, and we can identify a source. All the “Postage Paid Australia” stuff (correctly called “Imprint Mail”) is lodged over the counter in bulk, and turning up anywhere else, it’ll stand out like dogs’ balls. Of course, if you could somehow get it into the system, then you’d get away with it, but the short answer to your question is that it’d be detected at the point of entry into the system.
FYI, in the U.S., it’s ZIP Code, not zip code.
It stands for Zone Improvement Plan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
/pedantic loser mode
But interestingly, they are spreading as a handy alternative way of describing geography. The last time I looked for somewhere to live, it was very common for properties to be advertised by postcode area.
“Rat-infested garage, W8, £250/week” “Two-bed ex-council, E13, £150/week”, etcetera.
Sorry, but that introduces a whole load of new ambiguities, due to the history of local authority boundaries.
When living in Manchester, some people would insist on putting ‘Lancashire’ on the address, even though the city has been separate from that county for decades. Some places have been moved from one county to another. Many places, including London, are not in any county, and the present-day unitary authority areas would hardly be a convenient way to address things, because they don’t often have a very meaningful correlation to real-life geography.
Heh. I just tried it, GorillaMan, but to complete the Experian application form, I have to provide my last six years’ worth of UK addresses. It won’t accept a non-UK postcode for me even to proceed with the trial. :smack: