It's absolutely true, and while he could have made a mockup showing how it would look for someone with a zip code in eg. Dallas, getting through the bureaucratic hoops to actually get feed back from those who eventually shot it down ... that's just really hard, most places. "We can't show this to customers/users/management, it's not completely done!"
It's a process problem and you can't solve it bottom-up.
You either get used to it and work to the specs, knowing they will change a lot, or you try to get closer to whoever makes the decisions. More often than not, that leads you to another company working on a different problem ...
That makes sense. It doesn't scale terribly well because as you get more than maybe an hour from the central location by car/truck you can't expand further.
It also doesn't solve the problem of needing to have the customer fill out the form which scares tons of them away. It's either got to be signed in front of one of the company's employees, or notarized. Neither of which makes it easy for a company to grow.
It also means that you're still fairly tied down. Yeah a metro area is much larger than a single zip code, but it's definitely not a nationwide rollout in any kind of reasonable timeframe.
If having something like the zip code not be accurate, then what's the point of having the zip code in your data? People writing code to store zips/addresses are doing it to not not be able to send/verify/etc. They are doing so that the can, but if the data is wrong then they can't.
What countless applications that ask for a zip code/mailing address and don't need it to be accurate? I would then say that any that you name would actually not need the data in the first place. If your hoover it up just to sell later, wouldn't it be worth more to be valid? So again, I'm right back to why do you need it?
I'm not sure if it's true, but a friend once told me the reason a store asked for your zip code was to see if they had a large audience coming from a certain area. This let them know other locations to possibly open other stores.
> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.
For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).
The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.
It sort of makes sense though. The data is available at a plant level, but you can't necessarily tie a particular zip code to a particular processing plant, since supply chain/availability changes.
I guess my point is, the ZIP code should be a pretty good indication of the state that the person resides in. No, it is not perfect, but I think it lends itself to be somethng that can help with the OPs concerns.
I feel your pain. It turns out there are even a group of ZIP codes that apply only to specific businesses, buildings, or even people (if you're important enough).
Because they are friends with CEO/board/investors. I interviewed three startups that are exactly like that. One of the CTO asked how I would validate US zip code. I told him there are around 42K zip code, just store them in a hashmap and do lookups. He thought I was crazy and insist on Trie tree.
Probably a part of the issue is that how zipcodes are defined is not actually publicly accessible information. You can pay private companies for it, sure.
It's far more likely for someone to screw up writing digits than it is for them to write the wrong city name. People handle words well, but they don't handle numbers all that great.
And if they do write the wrong city, well, that's what the zip code is for.
I am in Australia and I often find this frustrating, I do completely understand why though. The United States has a population of 311 Million. In Australia we have a population of 22 Million.
When you consider the complications in making software global, I can see why our potential customer base doesn't make it worthwhile.
Even the simple things are tougher than they seem (post code vs. zip code). It seems easy enough to detect their location and display the right wording... but then your help documentation is going to be wrong for some, or will you create multiple versions of that too.
I wish it were different, but I suspect until we have the same needs/laws, it's going to continue like this.
I had the same experience at Harbor Freight. They needed my zip code in case I needed to make a return. I said "that's what the receipt is for...?" and she persisted so I gave her the zip code for the part of town the store is in.
Zip codes are often associated with social and economic status and Harbor Freight is in a really bad zip code. I wasn't about to tell everyone standing in line that I was getting in my $100k SUV and driving to my $500k home in the suburbs after they hear my zip code (none of that is true but that's what you'd expect from the city I live in compared to the city I was shopping in).
It's a process problem and you can't solve it bottom-up.
You either get used to it and work to the specs, knowing they will change a lot, or you try to get closer to whoever makes the decisions. More often than not, that leads you to another company working on a different problem ...
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