Magic Numbers How Postcodes Speed Up The Delivery Process

When they were first brought into widespread use, there was some resistance to the use of postcodes, many people seeing them as almost random series of letters and numbers which bore little relation to the address where a letter or parcel was being sent to.

But as with any coded form of language, there was a carefully thought-out system behind the format, which most people soon got used to using without having to give much thought to it.

The benefits which the wide-scale use of postcodes have brought to domestic and international carriage of letters and parcels have been widespread, and have touched most of us in positive ways.

The main purpose for their introduction was to facilitate the automatic sorting of letters and packages. The combination of letters and numbers which comprise each code can be read by machines in every sorting office, and they then send the consignment down the appropriate route to be placed into a bag which will be loaded onto a vehicle which is travelling to that area.

For sorting office staff, having to memorise a smaller set of letter and number combinations which signify a particular city or town, and individual areas within it, is far easier than having to remember the names of those places individually. But the system used is sufficiently specific to allow each postcode to refer to only a small number of possible destinations for any letter or parcel. On average, one single postcode represents 15 addresses in the UK, so the system offers a very precise means of pinpointing any address in the UK and Ireland.

Each country has its own variation on the postcode often referred to as the area or zip code and despite the fact that there is no single internationally-recognised protocol governing the format of these location designations, local knowledge of the people who work for international couriers in each individual country can usually ensure that a delivery can be directed easily to its correct destination.

While the formats themselves vary, the information encapsulated in postcodes is uniform for most countries. It will include a location code for the town or city, broken down into further sub-sections to denote specific parts of the conurbation. In the UK, the second section of the postcode then often represents a particular suburb or village, while the last two characters will stand for a particular road or a section of it.

Although no such system is completely foolproof, the use of this shorthand method of writing an address has become a widely accepted, and greatly appreciated, tool in helping the mass of parcels and letters sent every day safely reach their destination.