Fun Fact Friday! Cinder Blocks! You might think that the USPS wouldn’t allow cinder blocks to be mailed.  Well, you’d be right, but guess what?  They do!  Yes, you can ship cinder blocks via USPS, but let’s consider the pluses and minuses:  Pluses * It’s funny, at least once, more than once, it starts to beg questions…

Fun Fact Friday! The westernmost post office in the contiguous 48 states of the United States is located in La Push, WA 98350 (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Push,_Washington#), home to the Quileute Tribe, population between 375ct and 400ct. Outside the contiguous 48, when including Alaska and Hawaii, the westernmost post office is the “city” of Adak, AK 99546,…

Fun Fact Friday! US Postal Service creates Home Delivery as an available service in 1794.   It wasn’t always the case that you’d get mail delivered to your house. Before 1794, the standard was that you would pick up any mail in your name at a local tavern or even a shop such as a…

FUN FACT FRIDAY!  Believe it or not, the USPS ships a lot of living things. Here are some of the things that we could find (with, of course, USPS Domestic Mail Manual references) * BEES: honeybees and queen bees (ref: DMM 601.9.3.5) * BABY CHICKS: newborn chickens, ducks, emus, geese, guinea birds, partridges, pheasants (only…

FUN FACT FRIDAY: A Brief History of Absentee & Vote-By-Mail Voting Historically, less than 10 percent of American voters requested absentee ballots to be sent to them by mail. However, by 2020, during the height of COVID, vote by mail reached a high of 43% of all ballots cast. Absentee Voting originated during the War…

Fun Fact Friday! Did you know? The Swiss Post Office ranks as the best postal service in the world, scoring a perfect 100/100 in reliability, reach, relevance, and resilience, according to the Universal Postal Union’s 2020 Postal Development Report (source: UPU). Switzerland leads 170 global postal systems, while the United States Postal Service ranks 7th…

FUN FACT FRIDAY Did you know that as of 2024, there are approximately 167,000,000 delivery addresses in the country. New builds are added to the USPS database daily, totaling around 1,000,000 new delivery addresses a year.   Given the distribution network, the USPS is also the largest postal delivery service in the world and retains, in…

FUN FACT FRIDAY   Many of us might all remember the post office scene in Men In Black II (ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr7pyggTmmY) when Agent J (Will Smith) goes to pull Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) out of “retirement”, as Agent K was working as a postmaster at the Truro, MA 02666 post office.  Of course, Agent…

Fun Fact Friday: Meet Mr. ZIP™ — The Mascot Who Revolutionized America’s Mail!    Mr. ZIP™  was introduced in 1964 after the US Postal Service™ announced in 1963 that American addresses would be assigned 5-digit numeric values.  This new system was called the  Zone Improvement Plan, or “ZIP”, and was intended only to streamline mail…

Fun Fact Friday!  The 45.5 carat Hope Diamond was once shipped via regular First-Class Mail from New York City to the “Castle” in Washington, D.C., a.k.a.. the Smithsonian Museum.  The donor, a philanthropic NYC jeweler named Harry Winston, felt that sending gems through the Postal Service was “the safest way to mail gems” and was…