If i start using the ZIP + 5 for all my mail what will I be changing? Will my mail get there faster? I am sure I will at least be saving some type of time and labor on their side right? I know it is done automatically but if I use ZIP + 5 it probably has to save energy right? One less piece of sorting equipment
Wow I totally meant to say + 4
A lot of bad handwriting of words can be overcome by the legible use of a ZIP + 4.
The USPS also has a search page that will give you the ZIP+4 for any valid address.
It certainly gets quite specific. When I looked up mine I was surprised to learn that different blocks of units in the same apartment building as mine have different +4s for their ZIP codes.
The USPS’s address indexing scheme allows for no more than 100 addresses within a given zip+4. If your apartment building has more than 100 units, they have to assign more 9-digit zips.
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Not so. Multiple addresses can be assigned the same ZIP + 4. My mother’s home shares the same ZIP + 4 as the other four single-family homes on her side of the block.
What, in particular, did anyone say that you’re contradicting?
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It also has to do with the volume of mail. Years ago, I got an office USPS Zip+4 directory for New York. As I looked through Manhattan, found Zip+4 numbers for celebrities (e.g., Walter Cronkite and Isaac Asimov). I was a bit surprised – I’m sure they didn’t want the PO publicizing their home address. But evidently they got enough mail to have a designation all their own.
Shouldn’t be too surprising-- A zip+4 has the same number of digits as a Social Security number, and there’s more than enough of those to have a unique one for every citizen of the country.
And yes, they do help mail get to its destination faster. If you want to go all the way with it, machine-print (as opposed to by hand) all of your addresses, include the zip+4, and include the postal bar code (there are a variety of programs which will produce those, including I think some on the USPS website).
To get back to the original question, I’m not sure that using ZIP+4 on your personal, individual envelopes will actually get your mail delivered any faster.
I know it does help on bigger mailings, which are bundled and bypass some of the normal mail processing. And on Reply Envelopes, which have a facing mark near the stamps, so they too get pulled out to bypass some of the normal processing.
But on a regular envelope you fill out and toss in a mailbox? After it gets picked up and delivered to the sorting post office, it first goes thru the process to get all the envelopes right-side up and facing forward. Your envelope can’t skip that. Then it goes thru a scanning step, where the address is read, verified, correct zip+4 determined, and then printed onto the bottom of the envelope. Your envelope would go thru this step, too. I believe the post office machines check the address and look up the zip+4 code, even if you already have it on the envelope, to make sure it’s the correct one. So it really doesn’t help your envelope get delivered any faster to have the ZIP+4 on it. It does help if the address is printed poorly and might be misread; the ZIP+4 helps them get the correct location.
But I’m not sure that the ZIP+4 actually helps it get delivered faster. Individual mail pieces all go thru the same sorting process, so they take about the same time.
Whenever I’ve seen a +4 appended to an envelope that didn’t already have it, it’s not the same as the one you’d get from the USPS website for that address. I suspect that they have some standard +4 that’s reserved for “none specified”.
No, it’s the same ZIP+4 code – plus some more details, like carrier route & delivery point. And all that is in the bar code, which is what is used in the remaining sorting steps at the post office.
Why would they have a standard +4 code for “none specified”? That wouldn’t help any in the following steps of sorting & delivering the mail.
Conversely, if your house is on a side street and is the only one on one side of the block (as my previous residence was), then you have a ZIP+4 all to yourself. I used to use just the 9-digit ZIP for a return address, figuring the carrier eventually would figure out that there was only one possible source.