The (arbitrary?) 9 segment number examples from the Russian Postal Codes that were linked and were questioned as to why the USPS did not adopt them are ambiguous depending on how one chooses to fill out the segments of the numbers. For example 4 may be seen as 9. 8 is slightly less an issue, but amounts to 1 segment away from 0 and 9. If a machine or any and all perfectly rule following humans would be writing and interpreting the zip using 10 different characters mapped to the Arabic numbers, then it would be more optimal to try to maximize the mutual distance between them such as an anti-reflected binary code, which would be an increasingly challenging exercise with more segments that could start at 7.
Except no, specifically because 9 has a slanted ending compared to 4. If some idiot writes the symbols whatever they wants instead of the reference then it's the the problem of the idiot.
And any way, most people would write it properly which means more mail would be processed efficiently and require less human intervention.
There used to be many of these facilities. This is the last one. The demand has gone down as OCR has gotten better and hand addressed mail volume has decreased.
Just before the end is the likely reason for that: "70 hours a week".
This is the last such facility, after all the others have been closed, so needing more people is not incompatible with the fact that they've scaled down overall.
