A Tour of the Post Office

Last week, courtesy of the Printing Industries of Utah, a group of designers and printers were able to tour behind the scenes at the Post Office Sorting Center in Salt Lake City. Several of us from Lorraine Press went along to see what exactly goes on behind the scenes.

We were taken through the process a letter experiences between a mailbox and its final destination. Our tour started off in the delivery bay where mail carriers bring back the mail they have collected during their routes. Then the fun started.

A letter is first individually examined by a sorting machine. No matter how the letter went into the machine (upside down, backwards, etc.), a sensor can find the stamp and then tumble the letter through the machine to correctly place the address in front of the OCR software, so the OCR software can read the address. As if that wasn't cool enough, the OCR software can correctly identify the addressee (compared to a database of all mailing addresses in the United States) within 3 seconds over 90% of the time.

Then letters are sorted into categories. If the letter stays in Utah, it goes to one machine that then sorts it to the Utah Post Office that it belongs to. If the letter is to leave Utah, it goes to a different sorting machine. If the letter goes to some one on the Move/Forwarding database, it goes to a different area. The whole system of sorters and holding areas and organization of mail was astounding. There were even little trains overhead carrying bins of mail to the correct place, and fun twirly slides for the bins to slide down to the correct machine. The entire operation is a miracle in organization and computerization.

All mail is eventually moved from that first incoming bay, to the other side of the building where trucks are waiting to deliver mail to its destination, whether that be a local post office branch or the airport. By that time, it is organized not only by mail carrier route, but also in the order of the houses/addresses within that route.

The tour was entertaining, but also educational. The reasons behind the regulations on addressing mail, especially when dealing with mass mailings became clear when one could actually see the machines that were "reading" the addresses. We saw letters of all sizes being sorted, as well as larger flats. The new regulations of the locations of the address on magazines and large envelopes allow the machine locate the address and then sort it. The Post Office saves large amounts of money when the machines are able to handle the mail.

Overall it was a great tour, and we learned a lot. Thank you to the USPS employees who took time out of their day to show us around!