It’s further disguised because for many decades rural congressmen were very effective at getting a post office (and some jobs) installed in each and every Podunk town. With the effect that to a first approximation every town had a post office and every town had a zip code. So depending on where someone lives and how many places they’ve lived, it’s easy for folks to mistakenly conclude that one-to-one-to-one correspondence is universal.
That policy came to an end 30-some years ago. Especially as applied to the developing suburbs at the border between older burbs and ruralia. For years I lived in one such burb where our address wasLSLGuy
123 OurStreet
OurCity, OurState OurZipBut our mail was totally processed by a post office in a different municipality with a different postal city name which was responsible for several zipcodes, 3 municipalities beyond its namesake, and a lot of nearby unincorporated farmland.
Before automatic sorting machines, mail was sorted by hand. At your local post office they’d sort local mail out, and deliver the rest to the sorting centre. The sorting centre would sort out local mail and mail for other sorting centres. Local mail would go back out to the post offices, where it would be sorted for delivery.
In that system, there was no advantage to centerlising all the post offices. Somebody had to sort and deliver the local mail.
In theory, that system could have ended 50 years ago, with improvements in transportation and automatic sorting, but (1) the new systems didn’t work properly 50 years ago, and (2) people didn’t want it.
(In my system now, mail is sorted to delivery routes at central sorting, and the route bags are delivered to a pickup bux near me. My local postoffice is just a shop: they deliver to mail boxes inside the shop, and store parcels for collection, but they aren’t involved with delivery or collection to any extent)
Yeah. It’s nearly impossible to close a US small-town post office today until the town and surrounding population shrinks below 10. The locals put up such a fuss that the Congresscritter defends it to the death.
I also suspect that in, say, 1900 a much larger percentage of what we call “first class” mail (pretty much anything other than junk mail / advertising material) was addressed to someplace in the local PO’s area, or failing that, the first level sorting center’s area. So central sorting would’ve been wasteful as a large percentage of mail would be wagon-ed/trucked right back to where it originated.
Nowadays with substantially zero person-to-person mail, pretty much the only first class mail is monthly bills flowing from utilities, credit cards, bank lenders and such to customers. And the checks flowing the other way. The vast majority of this stuff will not be addressed locally.
As such, even if we still had the small-town mini-sorts feeding up the hierarchy, darn near everything would end up transiting one or more state- or multi-state major regional sorting centers on its way to/from the eventual sources and destinations.
The Post in all its varying national incarnations is actually a pretty amazing invention and a monstrously large logistical effort / network for as early in human history as it came about.
It’s not a critical part of the address - and I think it’s probably only included for human-readable legacy (maybe also as an additional layer of information redundancy against erroneous or damaged postcodes.
Actually, now I think about it, it’s probably there because if you ask for street, town, city and postcode, and people can’t remember the postcode, then street, town, city will still get it there (street + town alone may not, as there are many duplicates).
My postal address includes the postal town ‘Southampton’, but I very seldom include it because it feels wrong - in most part because I am closer to two other urban centres which are not that city (they’re not postal cities, but they feel more like ‘the nearest big place’ to me than does Southampton).
The utility firm I work for classifies all customers seeking service under the postcode. Which can cause problems when the building has multiple postcodes within it, which, typically multi-storey office blocks in London do. It can be hard to know that a cable has already been installed, or how many floors it already serves.
Without a postcode (e.g. on a large private estate with multiple buildings), it’s hard to get utilities to deliver service of any kind as the whole thing is bundled under one postcode without finer discrimination (does stop the TV Licencing gestapo coming after you, though, as they don’t know you exist).
There are non-geographical postcodes too - XX and BX are two that spring to mind. Amazon uses the former for returns, and some large banks use the latter. It gives them some flexibility as to location, without the hassle of redoing all their literature.
I’m one of those problems. I mentioned up-thread that I live in a 94-unit building with 12 postcodes assigned. The single building consists of two wings, each with a different street address. I live in the central “bridge” that connects the two wings. When we moved in we had trouble getting service turned on with the cable TV/internet people. The other utilities switched over just fine.
We finally sorted out that our power, water, and postal address come from the building’s left wing, while our cable comes from the right wing. So my 4-room flat’s billing and service delivery addresses are in different postcodes with different street addresses.
Automated sorting machinery parses the complete address and looks up the +4 code. It’s encoded in the barcode that gets ink-jetted near the bottom edge of the envelope.
My mum was born in a Rose Cottage, which looked as described on the tin. There are thousands of Rose Cottages. Other names will be “Primrose Farm” or “Pendle Hill House” or “Northend Farmhouse” or “The Old Rectory” or “The Willows”. My father’s parents had a house built and let my father name it, so it ended up “Rivendell”, which they thought was very pretty, never heard it before. :dubious:
In Wales names are Welsh, like “Blaen Y Cwm” [end of the valley] and “Bryn Bach” [small hill] and “Ffridd Fawr” [big pasture].
Apologies if you wanted to know what the houses around RobDog are called, I obviously don’t know. These are just random examples of what houses can be called in England and Wales. Not sure if that was your question.
I was taught to do that a long time ago, probably before foreign mail was sorted by automatic sorters, and you wanted to call attention to it, so it wouldn’t go into the automatic sorters. Of course, this is back when you used the air mail envelopes, and everything. Anyway, in the interim, no one (until now) has ever told me anything different.
Post Offices (The buildings, often located in shops except in town centres) in the UK were divorced from Royal Mail (The mail delivery service) around ten years ago, but the PO still takes letters and parcels and sells stamps etc on behalf of the RM. Originally the postman who delivered the letters (we get them through a letterbox in the door) worked from the PO, but for many years, each town/district has had a Sorting Office, where they are based and where they sort their “walks”.
Letters and small packages can be left on letter boxes. At least 99% of users of postal services are within 500 metres of a letter box. They are emptied at least once a day - some several times - and the contents are usually taken to the local sorting office, then transferred to the regional sorting office on through the system to the local off for the delivery. Drive on a British motorway at night and you will see several of the thousands of PO trucks crisscrossing the country.
The RM is now a PLC, having been the latest privatisation of all the old government monopolies. Even before that, competition was allowed and several other companies (UK Mail for one) have sprung up, or branched out, to cherry-pick the more profitable parts. In most cases, the last delivery part is done by the PO anyway.
In a recent development, Post Offices will be able to offer more banking services. With banks closing branches to save costs, Post Offices, especially rural ones, will take up the slack to enable people to deposit cheques etc.
I confess I have gotten into the habit of using city acronyms and zip codes on the last line of envelopes lately, but haven’t had any problems getting things where they need to go - so “Shaker Heights, Ohio 44120” becomes “SHO 44120” and “New York, New York 10006” becomes “NYC 10006.”
Yes. Not unusual to find lots of Cleveland 'burbs, for instance, using “Cleveland” as the city in addresses. It’s the Zip Code that tells you where the mail is really going.
Here’s a screengrab of a map of the village where my in-laws live. Hardly any of the houses have numbers, as you can see from the house names on the map.
The post town (in this case a larger town about 5 miles away) is meant to go in capital letters, and the county (Hampshire in this case) is no longer part of the official address.
The town where I live is mostly more modern housing which has numbers, but scattered around are quite a few older houses which only have names. When I had a paper round it took me a while to learn where Quarry House or The Oaks were.
Why are you worried? As several of us have said in this thread, it’s O.K. to put England down at the bottom of the address instead of United Kingdom. It will get there. It’s not even clear that putting England in the address instead of United Kingdom will even cause your mail to get there slower.
