Signed, Sealed, Delivered: USPS Fun Facts
Comprehensively compiled below, here are 10 of the funniest USPS fun facts for your enjoyment!
According to the USPS website, “The Postal Service moves mail by planes, hovercraft, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, subways, bicycles, mules and feet.” Not on the admittedly impressive list is pigeon, owl, tricycle, hot-air balloon, pony, horse (the Pony Express was, according to the USPS, not in fact part of the USPS for most of its brief existence), spaceship, hang glider, bulldozer, ambulance, taxi, Segway, snowmobile, TARDIS, golf cart, skateboard, and scooter. If you ever work as a mail carrier, maybe you can try adding to this list! Reed had better give you off-campus PE credit should you do so.
Imagine if the 188 faculty and 1,439 Reed students quadrupled. That’s about how many mail carriers in the country do their routes entirely on foot. The USPS refers to them as the “Fleet of Feet.”
The Postal Service ordered more than 447 million rubber bands in 2023. That’s nearly 330 thousand rubber bands for each one of the 1,358 Reed students!
The USPS sells an officially licensed mail carrier costume for dogs. It’s pretty cute, but it’s got nothing on Charlie from those Data Lab posters.
It is legal to send a brick through the USPS. Only one brick at a time, though. That loophole was closed after ingenious residents of Vernal, Utah sent 37 tons of bricks and other construction materials through the mail in 1916 and built an entire bank with them, because it was cheapest to send the bricks that way. The USPS lost about $800,000 in today’s money in the process and realized after that incident that they needed to be more specific with their wording requiring approval of “large and unusual shipment[s].” Whoopsies. A brief history: Until 1913, you could only ship a package weighing up to 4 pounds; on January 1, 1913, it was changed to 11 pounds. In August 1913 it went up to 20, in 1914 it went up to 50, and finally in 1983 it went up to 70 pounds. But the loophole allowing cheap shipment of bulk building materials got closed in November 1916 after the Vernal, Utah incident, with the USPS from that day forward officially calling shenanigans on 200 pounds of non-perishable items being shipped from one sender to one addressee in the same day. So it is unfortunately frowned upon to ship a future structure through the mail. …Unless each and every Reedie maxed out their 200-pound allotment! We could all theoretically ship 143.9 tons of building materials! Another Renn Fayre project, anyone?
And before you ask, no, you may not ship yourself to and from Reed. As stated in the USPS website’s list of fun facts, “Do not try to ship your kids!! In the early days of Parcel Post [the January 1913 rule allowing packages weighing up to 11 pounds], a few parents managed to mail their children to relatives. In 1913, an 8-month-old baby in Ohio was mailed by his parents to his grandmother, who lived a few miles away. The baby was safely delivered! Regulations were quickly established to prevent any additional mailing of children through the U.S. Mail.”
While it is not legal to ship living Homo sapiens through the mail, it is legal to ship living chickens through the mail, specifically baby chicks. “The Postal Service has been working with hatcheries for more than 100 years to safely transport mail-order chicks during the spring and summer months,” the USPS website proudly declares. “Thousands of chicks are transported through the U.S. Mail seamlessly every year. This is a legacy operation we take very seriously as lives are literally at stake.”
276 million square feet of bubble wrap were used by the USPS to ship COVID supplies. That’s enough to cover the Reed campus 43.125 times over!
Texarkana, AR, and Texarkana, TX share a post office that straddles the state line. Imagine if the mailroom was half on Reed’s campus and half on the campus of Lewis & Clark. The mailroom mannequin would have to swag with school colors split halfway down the middle!
There are 139,409 big blue public mailboxes around the country. That’s nearly 100 big mailboxes per Reedie. According to the USPS website, “They weren’t always blue. Before 1970, they were green, then red, then white, then green again, and finally — beginning in 1955 — red, white and blue.”