Then don’t do it. I’ll bet if you addressed something to: 24 Main
12345
it would find your friend Joe Smith who lives at 24 Main Street, Anytown, NY 12345.
But a little redundancy is a very good thing. Especially since people make many errors when addressing envelopes. If one part of the complete address is wrong or illegible, there’s an excellent chance that it will get to the right place eventually. Postal workers aren’t idiots and they are genuinely trying to get your mail to its destination. So if you screw up the zip code and the automated mail sorter sends it to Kalamazoo, the Kalamazoo postman will see that something went wrong, look up the right zip code for Anytown, NY, correct the address, and send it along. Leaving off the city and state might be more efficient, but it ends up in more dead letters.
The standard abbreviation for Washington is WA. It seems, though, that at some time in the past it was abbreviated WN. All boat license numbers here begin with WN to this day. You’ll also find a lot of older people who still write WN.
Most of them, anyway. It amazes me that I can send a letter to some slob 2,000 miles away and have it reliably delivered for a mere 37¢. Free-marketeers who hate government services simply don’t understand the meaning of the word “efficient;” we would be better off if we had simply called it Pareto.*
Redundancy and postal worker resourcefulness are useful…but can be a bit of a pain. Not everything is a state abbreviation.
I used to have an address that ended
PO Box XXXX
Basseterre
St. Kitts
W. I.
So, this should have told postal workers that I wanted my mail delivered to the city Basseterre, the country Saint Kitts, and the region West Indies. There exist no zip codes in that country. There aren’t even street addresses, as no one’s bothered to name most of the streets. And yes, the region is bigger than the country, so it comes afterwards.
So my mail would be looked at, determined to have no zip code, hand inspected, and they’d try to send it to the street “Basseterre St.”, the city “Kitts”, and the state of Wisconsin. Very resourceful of them. Also very wrong. Luckily, the postal folks in Wisconsin generally figured it out after a while and sent the mail to me.
The first section is the geographic designation - the final three characters are randomly assigned. Well, they’re probably not, but somebody else can explain them
Are you sure it wasn’t EH4?
Near HamPshire and ReadinG respectively, by any chance?
And re. Canadian airports, there’s a number of speculative answers here.
I read a newspaper story about fellow here who had to send something to his office from out of town. I guess the company had a long name plus a box number or slot number and whatever. The guy decided to see what would happen if he just wrote the name of the person he wanted to get it and the 9-digit ZIP code (like 12345-6789). Nothing else. It got there with no delay whatsoever. So the answer to your question is that we don’t need to do all the other stuff. I think we do it out of habit and the fear of “what if…”
A little Michigan fact for you: About 30 years ago the townsfolk of Mass decided to change their name to Mass City. Why? Because so much of their mail was winding up in Massachusetts. Mass was the common abbreviation for that state back then.
Phase42, I remember when many people used WN for Washington. It seemed as common as WA. And you’re right, boats still use it.
I agree with those who are amazed that a letter can get to a single house on the other side of the country for 37c. And it seems, from some of the anecdotes here, that the city and state are not really necessary as long as you have the postcode.
I also agree that postal workers are often very good at working out incorrectly addressed mail. For example, my wife got a letter from her grandmother that had the postcode written as 2121a instead of 21218.
But i did have a rather surprising experience recently. I wrote a check for our monthly rent–the first one in our new place–and posted it off to the landlord. He called about a week later and said that he hadn’t received it. I assured him that it had been sent, and he said he would wait a few more days. He was fine about the whole thing, but it doesn’t look very good when your first rent check to a new landlord is late, and all you can say is “It’s in the mail.”
Anyway, it didn’t arrive in the next few days (he only live two miles away), so i cancelled the check and wrote another one. About two weeks later, i got the letter with the original check back, with stamped messages on it saying “Not Deliverable as Addressed, Unable to Forward.” There was also a handwritten message that said “Don’t live here.”
I checked the address that i had written on the envelope, and it was completely correct except for 1 number in the zip code. I had written 21218 instead of 21217. While this was certainly my mistake, i was quite surprised that the post office hadn’t been able to work out where it should go. There is no street of the same name in the 21218 area code, and the street my landlord lives on is not a tiny alley or cul-de-sac, but a fairly major road, and even shares a name with a Baltimore neighborhood. And, as i said, it’s only two miles from here.
Go figure. I guess i won’t make the zip code mistake again, though.
In one of their issues (i think it was about 1993 or 1994–i don’t have my old Spy mags with me right now) they did a postal experiment. They decided to evaluate how famous people really were by sending letters to them (requesting an autograph) and putting completely inadequate addresses on the envelope. The idea was that postal employees are good representatives of the “average American,” and if the typical postal employee knows your name and can find your address, you must be famous.
For each celebrity, they sent four letters. I think the addressing format went roughly as follows:
Letter 1: Name of celebrity, state, zip code.
Letter 2: Name of celebrity, state.
Letter 3: Picture of celebrity (pasted onto envelope), state, zip code.
Letter 4: Picture of celebrity (pasted onto envelope) alone.
They measured success by how many responses they got, but this obviously couldn’t account for letters that were delivered but never acknowledged by the celebrity (or his/her PR people).
IIRC, none of the ones with just pictures made it, but a few others did. I seem to recall that Michael Jordan was one of the successful ones, but i can’t remember any others.
If anyone else recalls this Spy piece, maybe you can fill in the stuff i can’t remember.
I have heard (but cannot find my old 1963 Postal Zip Code book to confirm) that Nebraska actually started out as NB, but that when Canada began considering a two-letter Province code, the U.S. reset Nebraska to avoid confusion with New Brunswick.
While nearly everyone in the British Commonwealth would probably recognize W. I. as West Indies, it is a far rarer construction in the U.S. This is one reason why the USPS prefers that all mail bound for outside the U.S. bear the name of the country written in the common English spelling. (Leuven, Belgium rather than Leuven, Belgie; Mainz, Germany rather than Mainz, Deutschland)
mhendo - I’ve read that Ichiro Suzuki, the Japanese right fielder for the Seattle Mariners, is so famous in Japan that fans there can address an envelope to simply “Ichiro” and it will get to him. At least when he was still playing in Japan.
(And yes, I left out the other half of the post codes, just in case there’s some crazed stalker out there who’d like to track me down. Though any stalker who was after me would have to be very crazed indeed.)
The current US ZIPcode structure makes it possible to encode a single destination, and the automatic reading equipment should have no trouble if you address a letter that way.
ZIPs range from [ul][li]5 digits, which is actually 3 (large region) +2 (subregion). This gets you down to a small geographic area of varying sizes[]5+4 digits (ZIP-PLUS), which typically defines one side of a single block, but can be only for one business in one building if their mail warrants it.[]5+4+2 digits. The extra 2 are called “delivery point”, and are typically supplied by automated lookup equipment. They usually are derived from the last 2 digits of the street address or PO box, but 99 has a special meaning.[/ul][/li]
And all ZIP codes, when barcoded, have one more digit appended, a checksum. This is not actually part of the address, but serves as a simple error-check. So the maximum number of digits encoded is 5+4+2+1 = 12, which represents a single dropoff point for the carrier.
Once encoded, automated equipment reads only the barcode until it gets in the carrier’s hands. The sorting equipment just before that will put all mail in “walk sequence,” so the mail is exact order of his delivery route. This is a pretty good plan, since if the walk sequence should change (adding, subtracting routes or whatever) the addresses are unaffected. Only the computer data that stores the walk sequence is altered.
