A postal worker in Chicago, Illinois, loads her van with mail sorted by zip code.
On July 1 of this year, the “ZIP code” turned 50 years old. The United States Postal Service (USPS) introduced the ZIP code in 1963. At that time, postal workers were handling more than 67 billion pieces of mail each year.
Before the introduction of the ZIP code, all mail was sorted by hand using just local addresses. This meant that up to 10 postal workers might handle a piece of mail before it was delivered. As the United States population exploded following World War II, postal workers could not keep up with the huge increase in mail. They desperately needed a new system to help speed up sorting and delivery.
The “ZIP” in ZIP code stands for Zone Improvement Plan. This plan divides the United States into 10 regions, numbered 0 to 9. The first number in each 5-digit ZIP code represents one of these regions. The next two digits represent a region within a state, such as a large city. The first three digits together represent a USPS Sectional Center Facility, a hub for mail sorting in that region. The final two digits represent a local post office or postal delivery area.
At first, many people were not sure about the new ZIP code. In time, however, the ZIP code not only solved the problem of sorting mail quickly, but the 5-digit number also became one of the few numbers most people memorize.
Today, new technologies, such as computers and optical scanners, have increased the speed of sorting and delivering mail. Machines read the ZIP codes now and quickly sort them to help postal workers deliver the more than 159 billion pieces of mail sent each year. In the future, Postal Service officials hope to add Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which use latitude and longitude, to help them deliver mail even faster.
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