Originally published at: Man tests minimal address experiment by sending himself a letter | Boing Boing
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When I was in college (and dumb), I was getting ready to fly home for the summer. I had a HUGE amount of clothes to bring home; much of which was my winter/cold clothes, and I didn’t want to pay the $100 fee for checking a big bag on the plane, so I had the bright idea to mail it to my parents’ house; I wasn’t in a rush so I sent it as cheaply as possible, in my father’s old army duffle. Here comes the dumb part: I wrote the mailing address on a sheet of paper and taped it to the duffle. The post office I sent it at didn’t object at all to this (somehow), and they took my money and stamped the address sheet.
Two months later, at my parents’ house, we got a phone call that there was a large package for them to pick up at the post office. We knew it was mine, but we wondered why it wasn’t delivered. As it turns out, the shipping label had come off in transit (that was the dumb part), so there was no proof of postage. The only reason they found us was because my father (the smart one in this story) had sharpied on our last name and the city we lived in on the duffel, probably a long time ago. The post office, when presented with a big heavy object with no postage and ONE identifying mark (and likely owned by a veteran), decided to do the owner a favor and pass it along (when they had room) towards its destination halfway across the country. And when it got to the city, we were the only people in the phone book with that last name. Bingo.
I did have to pay postage again to pick it up, but it was a good lesson regardless.
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This is not surprising once you understand how UK post codes work. My post code for example, in 5 letters and numbers, encodes the city, street, and country I live in. All that is needed to specify the rest of my address is my house number. It’s a much more information-dense system than the American ZIP code, for example.
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I think 11 numeric digits is information-dense enough for a place as expansive as the US,
The delivery point barcode consists of your 5-digit Zip Code, ZIP+4, and the last two digits of your delivery address.
https://pe.usps.com/MailpieceDesign/Index?ViewName=CRMFIM
Of course we always write out the city, street, etc., cause people are prone to fuck up and mail is important stuff.
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The Canadian postal code system is fine-grained enough that I’m sure this would work with my address.
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By the way, did Rikki ever get that number in the mail? 
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ETA: Wow, video production has really changed since then!
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In high school I sent a letter from California to my friend in West Virginia by putting his address as the return address (and a nonsense address in the To area). I left off the stamp, and it was “returned to sender” for insufficient postage. Statute of limitations are up on this, I hope, or I’m on the hook for this 20 cent stamp federal crime.
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I work for a Scandinavian company, and the address to our headquarters is just a zip code, without any street name and number.
They also have a normal address with street name and number, but it has a different zip code.
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Former postal worker here: Please don’t do this. You might get away with it once or twice, but at some point someone will wonder how the letter got that close to its destination PO. Postal inspectors are real cops with guns and stuff, and the prison penalties for mail fraud are stiff.
(This is for all the other potential fraudsters out there; I agree that you probably got away scot-free on your big heist!)
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The Empire State Building in NY and Willis Tower in Chicago are big enough to have their own ZIP code. You could probably get away with just an office number and a ZIP there and get a delivery. Anywhere else in the U.S, though, no.
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in the US, a street number and a zip code + 4 is all that is needed. but please don’t abuse the USPS by sending coded addresses. their job is hard enough.
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Indeed. When I lived in the UK, my homes were in post-codes that ranged from 2 houses to 17.
In Canada, I noticed that the post codes for the places where I lived were the same post-code for every home on the “block face” – all the homes facing the same street between two adjacent cross-streets were the same code.
A friend in Australia sent us a letter at our current home in the US with just our surname and the town, state, and “USA”, which arrived with no delay. When we were next in the local post office we congratulated the clerk on this, and she said “There are only 700 addresses in the town & zip-code, and no-one else with your surname, so I didn’t even notice that it didn’t have an address when I sorted it for delivery.”
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This one missed an entire monarch
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UK post only requires the street address and the post code, which has to be on the bottom line.
Sometimes a single large building has its own postcode, in which case technically you don’t need the street address.
I used to work at a company with a very large HQ in Oxford. I once read out the address to someone who had to send me something. They asked me, “Which number on XXX Street is it?”
“Well, it’s all of XXX Street, actually.”
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Three of them, actually.
ETA: I see it arrived in 2021, so only two.
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Ireland’s An Post surely reign supreme here:
If you can’t be bothered to click through, the address was:
Your man Henderson
That boy with the glasses
Who is doing a PhD up
there at Queen’s in Belfast.Buncrana
Co. Donegal
Ireland.
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