Some of my friends are postal workers and have described their mail sorting to be roughly this. It's not a general algorithm though, there is knowledge of their

Some of my friends are postal workers and have described their mail sorting to be roughly this. It's not a general algorithm though, there is knowledge of their route weaved in. So the most significant bit would be the street name, but they'd remember houses 42+ are earlier in the route and direct them to a different bucket. For this reason the person delivering the mail also sorts it. Computer science isn't directly applicable because we generally deal with general purpose algorithms, but I wonder how often their work is applicable to us, how often could we see huge improvements by using a specialized for the purpose sorting algorithm?