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USPS Service Standards Maps
- windows2020 5y agoThese stand out: 009 SAN JUAN PR 096 NY MILITARY
- op00to 5y agoThey’re zip codes.
- Ichthypresbyter 5y agoOr the first 3 digits, which denote which facility mail addressed to that zip code is sorted at. The default when you open the page is an interesting one- "005 MID-ISLAND NY". Almost all New York zip codes start with a 1, but the Mid-Island facility in Melville, which serves codes beginning 117, 118 and 119, also sorts mail addressed to the IRS processing center in Holtsville with the zip code 00501- which happens to be the lowest zip code in current use.
- p1mrx 5y agoWhich came first, the IRS facility or the zip code?
- jonathanoliver 5y agoI believe the IRS facility in Holtsville existed first. Then, due to mail volume, a ZIP Code was created to facilitate routing of letters.
- ciabattabread 5y agoAlso: 340 FL MILITARY 962 SF MILITARY More on military mail here: https://faq.usps.com/s/article/How-Do-I-Address-Military-Mail https://faq.usps.com/s/article/How-Do-I-Address-Military-Mai...
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
- t3rabytes 5y agoOne interesting thing I've noticed is that for my zip (central NC), originating and destinating first-class letters show different areas -- for example, for mail I send, none of it is scheduled for 2-day to Virginia even though I'm very close to the border (50 miles?), but for mail I receive, half of Virginia is in the 2-day zone. I'm a huge fan of the USPS and really want them to succeed. For my personal stuff, it's really hard to beat Priority (typically I use the flat-rate packaging) for packages that need to cross the country in a reasonable time compared to the Big 2's "ground" services.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- p1mrx 5y agoFor lightweight packages, I think first class is a better value, though it's more difficult to print postage at home.
- js2 5y agoCheck out https://www.pirateship.com/ https://www.pirateship.com/. I think I heard about that site here first. It offers discount rates on USPS and UPS. I think it even offers some USPS services that normally require a trip to the post office.
- iudqnolq 5y agoThat's an incredibly sketchy website. Looking through all their about pages all I see is FREE and nothing about how they get discounts and how they make money.
- js2 5y agoHelp > Getting Started > How does Pirate Ship make money? https://support.pirateship.com/en/articles/1860717-how-does-pirate-ship-make-money https://support.pirateship.com/en/articles/1860717-how-does-... They get discounted rates from UPS and USPS, keep a small percent of that discount for themselves, and pass the rest of the savings between the discounted rate and full retail rate on to the customer. I have no relationship with Pirate Ship except that I'm a happy customer. It makes shipping via UPS and USPS easier than using the UPS or USPS sites directly, and it's cheaper. I only wish I'd discovered them sooner. To give an example of one nice touch on their web site. When entering an address, you can fill out all the annoying individual fields, or you just click "Paste Address" and you get a box where you can paste the full address which it parses into the right fields.
- kevindong 5y agoOne interesting thing is that First Class Parcels have noticeably faster delivery times than First Class Letters (as long as you both start and end in the continental US).
- keefe8 5y agoIt looks to me like "First Class Parcels" includes Priority Mail, since there's no other category that could reasonably cover Priority Mail ("Package Services" can't since it shows much slower delivery from one side of the contiguous US to the other than is advertised). I used to ship a ton of First-Class parcels and Priority parcels about 10 years ago, and learned that they had roughly the same delivery speed (2-3 days anywhere in the contiguous US) with First-Class just having a higher chance of delay. As I never paid attention to letter delivery speed back then, I didn't realize that letters are much slower (except local). So seeing these maps today is informative.
- wsh 5y agoThe maps show the standards only for services, such as First Class Mail, that are classified as “market dominant.” Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express are “competitive” products.
- sokoloff 5y agoIf you click the text in the second paragraph at the top (that doesn’t look like a link), you can find the projected transit time for a specific shipment and service.
- dawnerd 5y agoI did a ton of eBay up until this last year and there isn’t much difference between first class and priority other than priority gets well priority during sorting but usually they all end up together. Important to note for those unaware that first class parcels are limited to up to one pound.
- jffry 5y agoHere's a neat bit of zip code esoterica: domestic US mail can be sent to US embassies abroad via special addresses in Washington DC. [1] Each embassy has a unique nonexistent house number and street name within the 20521 zip code.[2] For example, the embassy in Paris is "9200 Paris Pl, Washington, DC 20521-9200". Oddly, the only duplicated number in the list is "3180 Grenada Pl" and "3180 St George’s Pl"; St George's is the capital of Grenada. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#Scope_and_international_mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#Scope_and_internation... [2] https://www.state.gov/official-addresses/ https://www.state.gov/official-addresses/
- bombcar 5y agoMost post offices have a zip code one higher than the town for the post office boxes. And since a small post office will have less than 9999 boxes you can identify one by zip+4.
- Stratoscope 5y agoI remember testing this theory when I lived in Los Gatos, CA around 1980 and had a PO Box there. Los Gatos has three zip codes: 95030 for the downtown area where I lived, 95031 for the PO boxes at the downtown post office, and 95032 for the east part of town and the hills. I put a stamp on an envelope and wrote nothing but 95031-nnnn on the envelope, where nnnn was my PO Box number. Mailed it from some other local town, and sure enough it was delivered to my PO Box!
- smelendez 5y agoThis may be because St. George's seems to have no longer have any municipal government per https://www.nowgrenada.com/2017/05/continued-uglification-urban-st-george/ https://www.nowgrenada.com/2017/05/continued-uglification-ur...
- nathancahill 5y agoAnother bit of zip code quirkiness: Zip code data is copyrighted to the USPS and can not be reused without purchased permission. To get around that, the openly available ZIP Code Tabulation Areas from the US census are a rough approximation of the same data, so it gets used often as a free alternative.
- gumby 5y agoFive days for a first class letter is pretty pathetic, really. How the mighty have fallen. What happened that caused Congress to suddenly support the post office this year after decades of abuse?
- dredmorbius 5y agoCovid-19 Vote-by-mail
- gumby 5y agoIn case it was not clear, I meant abuse of the postal service by Congress.
- orangepurple 5y agoPick any 2xx series ZIP & First-Class Letters & Flats. Why is there a tiny portion of the center of Wyoming that is 3 day service when the surrounding area for hundreds of miles has 4 day service?
- keefe8 5y agoIt looks like that yellow (3-day) spot is a bit of land with no assigned zipcode, per this site: https://zipmap.net/Wyoming.htm https://zipmap.net/Wyoming.htm
- keefe8 5y agoAnd there's this odd thing there (turn on satellite view): https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wyoming/@42.6903821,-107.5324005,883m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x875ee23448e12e69:0x26b02279d27d382f!8m2!3d43.0759678!4d-107.2902839 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wyoming/@42.6903821,-107.5...
- bombcar 5y agoMight be the remains of an airfield or something. Perhaps it was an missle silo.
- orangepurple 5y agoThere appears to be a white disc at the end of the removed runway with unnatural dirt patterns. Maybe that's a launch silo? It almost seems like there used to be a runway there to bring in materials and build an underground structure (white disc). The structure does not appear to cast a shadow, potentially indicating that it is flush with the ground.
- jrochkind1 5y agoIt's so sad to look at. 5 days for first-class mail? Remember when we were a first-world country where you could get first-class mail delivered from coast to coast in 3 days or less? That was 6 months ago.
- lelandfe 5y agoA reminder that Louis DeJoy is somehow still the postmaster general.
- beanjuiceII 5y agoI've been working at usps for 18 years...DeJoy is the best PMG over that entire span.. i really don't get what the hate is about
- lelandfe 5y agoI'm not sure what your criteria for "best" is. But others' concerns stem from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Postal_Service_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Postal_Serv...
- throwaway111023 5y ago
- aldebran 5y agoHave you been sleeping while he’s been dismantling the USPS and blatantly been sabotaging ability to reliably send absentee ballots in time?
- beanjuiceII 5y agohe has not been dismantling anything that wasn't already in the works
- jrochkind1 5y agoAs an employee, what do you like about what he's done? I am actually curious.
- banana_giraffe 5y agoIn SCF 770 and others, there's a small section of Wyoming that gets 3 days. The same section (single Zip code?) in SCF 810 gets 4 days, despite being right next to the 2 day sections. I mean, it could be some sort of data entry thing, but now I wonder what's going on with that section.
- bombcar 5y agoWe moved about half a mile and lost the ability to get the scanned mail, even though every step is literally the same down to the carrier, so who knows the esotericism of the buearucracy.
- inChargeOfIT 5y agoAll I know is FEDEX ships packages to my house. UPS ships packages to my house (with a smile).. USPS either stuffs everything they can into my mailbox like they are packing a mortar tube; or more often than not, they simply tell me to suck it and come pick it up.
- sixstringtheory 5y agoInteresting that a letter sent from NYC will take 1 day longer to arrive in Fairbanks or Juneau vs what I presume are the oil fields on the eastern north slope near ANWR. Yet a letter sent from Fairbanks takes a day longer to arrive in the same oil fields area than the rest of the interior and the quite remote NW.
- TMWNN 5y agoSome odd things can happen when the destination is close (relatively speaking), but not too close. A recent example is USPS Parcel Select packages from the SF Bay area to Sacramento being routed through Los Angeles (!). I have seen this twice in the past couple months. This does not happen with Priority Mail.
- scg 5y agoIs this map showing expected delivery times based on realized deliveries, or based on intended schedules? I wonder what the p95 latencies looks like, along with failure rates, and most challenging ZIP Codes, volumes, etc. Can USPS even log all this data?
- clarionbell 5y agoIn interest of putting things in perspective I've found couple of sources comparing USPS and other national post carriers. Report by Universal Postal Union from 2020 [0] and an old (1996) report from GAO about post system reforms undertaken world wide.[1] Especially the UPU report is ... surprising. I never would have guessed about some of the rankings. But it appears to be well researched, and methodology section seems sound. [0]https://www.upu.int/UPU/media/upu/publications/2020-Postal-Development-Report.pdf https://www.upu.int/UPU/media/upu/publications/2020-Postal-D... [1]https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-ggd-96-60.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-ggd-96-60.pdf
- philshem 5y agoI felt the urge to create these images as one big GIF ~80 MB: https://github.com/philshem/usps-maps-gif/blob/main/usps-maps.gif?raw=true https://github.com/philshem/usps-maps-gif/blob/main/usps-map... scripts: https://github.com/philshem/usps-maps-gif/ https://github.com/philshem/usps-maps-gif/
- kinard 5y agoIt's now throwing a permissions error, guessing they don't want you to know their standards ;) You do not have permission to access this page If you have found this page in error, please contact support Reference:1096925678761587964184320227559749541820034968299102359
- mauvehaus 5y agoAnybody care to hazard a guess why White River Junction, VT has ten prefixes and Cleveland, OH has two? I trust I'm not going to get a [[citation needed]] when I make the claim that Cleveland is somewhat bigger by any conceivable measure.
- bobochan 5y agoI can't believe WRJ came up on HN. But, where are you seeing that? WRJ only has one zip code (that I know of), 05001. WRJ (population between 2,000-3,000) is not only smaller than Cleveland, it is not actually a town. WRJ is a village of the town of Hartford, VT and probably would not be known at all without the railroad station. Found it: WRJ mail sorting plant is a "sectional center facility" for a lot of NH and VT. A destination sectional center facility (SCF) is a processing and distribution center (P&DC) of the United States Postal Service (USPS) that serves a designated geographical area defined by one or more three-digit ZIP Code prefixes. A sectional center facility routes mail between local post offices and to and from network distribution centers (NDCs) and Surface Transfer Centers (STCs), which form the backbone of the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectional_center_facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectional_center_facility
- mauvehaus 5y agoIt's listed on the dropdown for 035, 036, 037, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 057, 058, and 059. Being relatively new to the area, I haven't the faintest idea where any of those (besides 050) are. Thanks for shedding some light on yet another interesting aspect of our postal system. If you're in WRJ, hello neighbor! And if you're not, but are nearby, happy mud season :-)
- toinetoine 5y agoInteresting according to the map, the standard for first class mail from New York will reach the most northern part of Alaska in 4 days versus 5 days for Los Angeles.