Zip + 6? Zip x 2 + 1? Get ready for the 11-digit Zip

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 1990 by Susan Hovey

Zip 6? Zip x2 1?

NEW YORK CITY--If you thought Zip 4 was fun, you'll enjoy the latest from the United States Postal Service (USPS): By late fall, it will begin giving bar code discounts to business customers depositing mail with 11-digit Zip Codes.

The practice, according to Robert Mitchell, a principal economist for the USPS, should allow business mailers to get an early start in preparing for an Advanced Bar Code system scheduled for 1993, allowing postal carriers to sequence letter mail for delivery.

"Long-term Advanced Bar Code automation requires those other two digits," says Mitchell. While the current 4 digits represent a street side, building or block face location of an address, the two additional digits will be the last two numbers of the street address. "One of the beauties of the two-digit add-on is that everybody already knows the information--it's already on the mail."

But not everybody sees the change as a thing of beauty. "It's overkill," says Matthew Clancy Sr., circulation director for Bill Communications' Plastics Technology. "Eleven digits gives us 99 billion possibilities to locate 280 million people. They have pre-determined that some numbers will never be used."

Clancy would like members of the USPS and direct mail industry to examine jointly the current Zip Code structure. "When you get to 11 digits, it's time to look at things," he says.

The add-on plan stems from the way the Zip 4 system envolved, according to Mitchell. "When we introduced Zip 4 back in the late seventies, we had a horrible national reaction," he recalls. "Everybody talked about Orwell's 1984, and Congress got all excited. People felt very strongly about this business of turning America into numbers."

The result, says Mitchell, was a nine-digit system in which the first five digits remained the same--a move designed to placate critics.

But "that put a constraint on us," he explains, noting that only the four additional digits could be manipulated. "We're pretty sensitive about referring to this as Zip 6 or 11 digits because it doesn't require any new information."

In effect, the change should mean business as usual for business mailers, according to Mitchell.

"Everybody I've talked to agrees that it isn't hard to put two more digits in the code," he says.