After doing my monthly bills I happened to notice all the envelopes provided by my creditors had two sets of bar codes printed on them. The ones at the top were all the same except for a “business reply” envelope, which was slightly different. The ones at the bottom were all different–maybe zip codes. But if we are picking up the postage, what do the companies get out of it? If it’s to ease mail sorting and keep the price of postage down, I guess it hasn’t worked. –Mark Cnota, Chicago
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Where is our faith in progress, Mark? Bar-code sorting costs one-fifth as much as older mechanical sorting ($3 versus $15 per thousand pieces), and less than one-eleventh as much as hand sorting ($35 per thousand). By 1995 the postal service hopes to be using bar codes on virtually all mail, resulting in a savings of $5 billion per year. In light of this it may seem strange to you that mail rates are going up, but that’s because you don’t understand the intricacies of postal economics. Not to worry. Nobody else does either.
You’ve probably already seen bar codes (but not FIM marks) on mail you’ve received. The bar codes are put on by the post office using optical character recognition (OCR) equipment. This reads the typewritten address, looks up the proper nine-digit zip code (if missing) in the post office’s vast address database, and prints it in bar code form on the envelope. All subsequent sorting is done by relatively inexpensive bar code readers.
