Each day more than 200,000 United States Postal Service (USPS) carriers deliver mail to approximately 100 million individual domestic addresses. The mail received and delivered by the USPS generally consists of three broad types of items, namely letters, flat mail that is larger than letter mail, and parcels. The term “letter” is generally used to refer to postcards, standard sized letters and mail pieces of similar dimensions, whereas the term “flat” is generally used to refer to magazines, catalogues and similar, larger mail pieces. Before a carrier begins to walk or drive through his or her delivery route, it is the carrier's responsibility to put all of this mail into an appropriate sequence for efficient delivery.
Under the present USPS procedure, the carrier assembles at least three sequenced stacks of mail, including letters, flats (including enveloped and non-enveloped magazines), and parcels. The carrier may also have one or more additional sequenced stacks, e.g., pre-sorted mass-mail items to be delivered to many or all of the stops on the delivery route. Thus, at each delivery stop the carrier selects the items for that address from each of the various stacks and puts them all into the postal patron's mailbox. This sorting and shuffling through various stacks of mail is time consuming, inefficient, and consequently expensive to the USPS.
One approach to reducing the amount of handling required is to sort and assemble the mail by delivery point. However, current mail sorting systems are not adapted to sort and collect mail destined for a single delivery point or address as a discreet group of mail pieces. Rather, mail is typically sorted in delivery bar code sorting machines into bins using destination information scanned from the mail piece using a bar code scanner or optical character recognition equipment. Although these machines are capable of sorting mail pieces within a limited size and thickness range, these machines are limited to sorting the mail into delivery order. Further, a large fraction of mail is not processed with these machines and must be manually sorted, producing a multiplicity of groupings of mail sorted into delivery order. This leaves the carrier with the task, at each delivery point, of separately accessing each grouping or stack of mail and separating the mail within each group by delivery point.
Thus, there exists a need for an automated method and apparatus that is capable of sorting and assembling mail pieces destined for a single delivery point into a single, discreet group for delivery by a carrier, as well as for reducing the amount of manual labor used to prepare or case mail for delivery.