Different lobby drop slots for mail going different places?

August 2, 2020 9:55 AM

Growing up in Massachusetts in the 80s and 90s, I remember there being at least two different slots in the post office lobby drop -- one for local mail and one for out-of-town mail. Am I remembering this right? How were these slots actually labeled? Is this still a thing in some places? BONUS Q: can you tell me about similar divisions in other postal systems?

This is a rabbit hole I went down while writing, and it's proven extremely difficult to google.

posted by Narrative Priorities to Society & Culture (23 answers total)

That's still definitely a thing here in small town Florida and was also definitely a thing in NYC as recently as six or seven years ago.
posted by saladin at 9:58 AM on August 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Definitely still a thing in my local post office in a small Vermont town. I think one slot says "Out of Town" and the other is labeled with the name of our town. Maybe it says "[Town Name] only."
posted by Redstart at 10:04 AM on August 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Our post office in NYC still has this, but the slots are super-close to one another so I wouldn't be surprised if they now go to the same place.

I think it's because people want / expected their same-city mail to be delivered the next day, and this made it easier to sort.
posted by Mchelly at 10:08 AM on August 2, 2020

A huge thing in Cambridge at least was a separation between stamped mail and metered mail.
posted by Melismata at 10:09 AM on August 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

I clearly remember this growing up in Philadelphia, also in the 80's and 90's. I don't remember seeing it in the post office in Seattle now, but frankly that means nothing since I've spent like 15 minutes total in post offices in the last 2 years, and never had to mail anything using the slots.
posted by kalimac at 10:09 AM on August 2, 2020

Still a thing in small town Maine. I think the local slot is for one zip code only.
posted by unreasonable at 10:27 AM on August 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yep, this was/is a thing in both my small town in the sticks AND in my dense inner-ring suburb city in a large metro area. I know that they for sure kept the local mail separate in my small town but I suspect that in my current city the "local mail" slot is just a folksy anachronism and all of the mail from it and the "out-of-town" slot wind up in the same big bin.
posted by Gray Duck at 10:32 AM on August 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Definitely still a thing in my local post office in a small Vermont town.

Mine too! One says out of town and one has the town name. But! They used to get sorted into different mailbags and now they all go into one mailbag (I asked)
posted by jessamyn at 10:34 AM on August 2, 2020

The GPO in Dublin, Ireland still has this - see this photo for example.
posted by scorbet at 10:34 AM on August 2, 2020

Here in my part of small town Canada, we have two mail boxes, one for mail within the region (about 4 hours' drive across) and one for mail beyond. The regional mail box is sorted locally by hand and stays in the region, while the further away mail goes to the nearest big city postal sorting plant.
As I understand it, this is so they can maintain a 2-day delivery standard in the region, which might not be possible if they send it over the mountains to the big city and then it has to travel back.
posted by ssg at 10:44 AM on August 2, 2020

My office building in Arlington, Virginia had this until about a year ago. (When they completely removed the mail room as part of renovations, and replaced it with just a blue mailbox.) One slot said "Local Mail," one slot said "Regional Mail" and one slot said "Other Mail." They all collected into separate boxes. But when I asked my mail carrier which slot to drop a specific mail piece in, he said that they had not really differentiated between them for many years. That would have been around 2005 or so.
posted by gemmy at 10:57 AM on August 2, 2020

We had this as well in the past at my post office here in the US -- one slot marked with our city name, and one marked Out of Town. (It's a large and busy post office that services our downtown business district, so I think there might have been a third slot marked just for our specific zip code, too.) Now all the slots are marked FLATS AND ENVELOPES.

This changed some years ago (maybe 10? 15?) when the postal service established a state mail sorting facility in our state's capital city about an hour from here. Now all mail gets collected and sent up there first, then our local mail gets boomeranged back down here. In general, local mail takes a day or two longer than it did, but out-of-state mail runs a day or two faster, so it kind of balances out.

This was a problem, though, earlier this year when our central sorting/distribution center had a covid outbreak and became a huge bottleneck for both incoming and outgoing mail across the state.
posted by mochapickle at 11:49 AM on August 2, 2020

I'm pretty sure I remember a local mail slot, though I may just be remembering stamped vs metered mail (which was a distinction we definitely had).

My NYC post office only has one slot, coincidentally, and doesn't even seem to have a slot that's been closed up, which I have seen sometimes. I don't think the big post office across from Penn Station differentiates, either. There are multiple slots, but IIRC, they're all the same (I'm slightly confused by it every time I'm in there).
posted by hoyland at 12:07 PM on August 2, 2020

My local post office still does this. There are two USPS blue mailboxes outside the post office, one is labeled LOCAL MAIL ONLY. I assume this skips the regional mail processing center and is dealt with in the local post office only.
posted by epanalepsis at 12:19 PM on August 2, 2020

Another "still doing this" from small town New Hampshire.
posted by nosila at 12:53 PM on August 2, 2020

"Small" town in NJ and we had two mailboxes right outside the post office labeled that way. Now they added a FedEx box next to them. Inside we still have the two slots but as was stated above, they are very close together and it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't fall into the same bin.
posted by annieb at 1:59 PM on August 2, 2020

I actually went to go take a picture of the two blue mailboxes at the post office in the town next to mine (in southeastern Massachusetts), but it turns out USPS has switched them from Local Only and Out of Town to Priority Express and First Class boxes sometime in the last couple of years (I usually go into the post office for a clerk transaction, so I can't pinpoint when that changeover actually happened.)
posted by smangosbubbles at 2:53 PM on August 2, 2020

They had this at the (now closed) satellite Mountain View post office where I had a PO Box for many years. When I put a local into the distant slot by mistake and alerted the guy behind the counter to my error he said to relax, it all goes into the same bin on the other side of the wall.
posted by Rash at 3:18 PM on August 2, 2020

Agreed on the - both slots go into the same bin now - reality.

But in many East Coast cities in the time before telephones and partway into it, postal service used to be a Big Deal. Big enough that there were multiple deliveries per day, say at 10 am and 4pm.
If you wanted to send a note to your sister on the other side of Boston, you could get it into the Local bag by 10 and she'd have it by 4; or by 4 and she'd have it by the next morning.
The Out of Town slot, say going to your cousin in Philadelphia, would go in a different bag, to be placed on a train that was itself a mail processing facility; it would get sorted on the rolling train to be distributed on arrival from there.
So you'd want two slots that went into two separate processing streams.
Even in a leafy suburb, you'd have one bag for mail across the suburbs, and another headed for The Big City.
As things like ZIP codes and optical readers sped up processing, that went away. But the largest factor was simply a vastly smaller volume of mail. Imagine if all your emails were physical paper objects, and so were everyone else's, and what a vast processing and distribution network that would have had to be.
You'd need the Local vs Distant slots as a first sorting step. Now they both just fall into a mostly empty bin of birthday cards and bills paid by check. You're just seeing leftover infrastructure, like a flange on the sidewalk where a phone booth used to be, or a fire department call box.
posted by bartleby at 3:51 PM on August 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

This was absolutely a thing all over Denmark, till maybe five years ago? Maybe more. It isn't now.
posted by mumimor at 5:05 PM on August 2, 2020

Ours has two slots: “Town Name” and “Out of Town.” It seems like they lead to different bins, but who knows for sure? Midsize upstate NY town.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:31 PM on August 2, 2020

Here in Paris we have four slots - Paris, suburbs, other departments, and overseas.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:42 PM on August 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

In Berlin, all the street boxes have local and out of town slots side-by-side. Not sure if there is still a divider in the box.
posted by dame at 5:46 AM on August 3, 2020