ZIP system keeps mail flowing

In Act I of Madison native Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Rebecca, the central character, tells her brother about a letter her friend received. Here’s the dialogue: Rebecca: “I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.” George: “What’s funny about that?” Rebecca: “But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God—that’s what it said on the envelope.” George: “What do you know!” Rebecca: “And the postman brought it just the same.” George: “What do you know!” I can remember when mail used to come to our house when I was a kid, and it would be addressed “Chet VanHaren, Oconto Falls, Wisc.” No rural route, no box number, no ZIP code. My Uncle Ken even sent us a coconut from Guam during World War II with that address written right on the coconut. I thought about that when I saw a little table tent at my brother-in-law’s 50th wedding anniversary party last week. The note said “ZIP codes introduced 1963.” Same year as Mike and Carol’s wedding. The U.S. post office designed the ZIP codes to improve the methods of sorting and delivering mail. The first three digits of the code represent the part of the country the mail is going to, and the last two identify the post office within that region. The ZIP codes start with zero in the Northeast and get bigger as one moves south and west, and there are more than 42,000 ZIP codes in the United States. And even though a lot of people don’t use them, the post office introduced “ZIP+4” in 1983. “ZIP + 4” added a hyphen and four additional digits. The first two digits of the addendum stand for a specific group of streets or cluster of large buildings, and the last two narrow it down further, specifying one side of the block or even one floor in a large building. In my third paragraph, I used the old abbreviation for Wisconsin, “Wisc.” That, and the shorter “Wis.” were part of a system of traditional abbreviations for U.S. states and territories but were replaced by the modern, two-letter abbreviated codes for the states at the same time that the post office introduced ZIP codes in 1963. Supposedly, the purpose for the new abbreviations was to make room for ZIP codes in the address, rather than to standardize state abbreviations per se. The two-letter postal abbreviation system was complicated by the fact that there are eight state names that begin with M, and to avoid duplication, some abbreviations they came up with were not really intuitive. Three of those states start with MA. Maine was not a problem because it had always been ME, but Maryland and Montana had to have new ones. And Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi and Minnesota all begin with Mi. So they had to be a little creative. Since 1963, only one state abbreviation has changed. Originally Nebraska was “NB,” but in November 1969, the post office changed it to “NE” to avoid confusion with New Brunswick in Canada. I read that from 1943-1963, the amount of mail flowing through the U.S. postal system doubled from 33 billion pieces of mail to 66.5 billion. For the 188 years before that, the mail had been sorted by hand. With volumes growing, the Postal Service couldn’t keep up, and the ZIP code was introduced as a way to help automate the flow of mail. There was some initial opposition to the ZIP system. Some people were concerned they were being depersonalized, turned into numbers, having our individualism quantified, making us easier to track. And as it turned out, they may have been sort of right. Policy-makers, politicians, statisticians, pollsters, insurers, businesses, organizers and marketers use our ZIP codes for all kinds of stuff. Regardless, the ZIP code lets the Postal Service do what would otherwise probably be impossible, carrying 40 percent of the world’s mail to 5 percent of the world’s population, even if most of it, at this point, is junk mail!