Why Strange Stickers Are Appearing on Mailboxes Across Minnesota
If you walk out to get your mail here in Minnesota and see an orange or yellow sticker on your mailbox soon, here's what that means.
These days, many of us have become much more familiar with our local Minnesota postal workers (along with our UPS and Fed-Ex delivery drivers too) thanks to all those home deliveries they've been making due to all that online shopping we've been doing over the past few years.
Of course, many of us added some new furry friends to our families during the years since the pandemic as well. And it's the confluence of both of those facts that could add up to you having a new orange or yellow sticker on your mailbox.
Wait, what? It's all part of a pilot program the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) started a few years ago in the Gopher State that's designed to try to decrease the number of dog bites suffered by postal workers.
USPS says said getting bitten by a dog is a big problem for postal workers here in Minnesota, noting that more than 4,200 USPS workers have suffered a dog bite in just the Twin Cities metro area alone during the first half of 2021. That's a lot of bites! So, USPS introduced the Dog Paw program here in Minnesota. It uses color-coded stickers placed on mailboxes to help awareness:
An orange dog paw sticker means a dog lives at the home and a yellow sticker lets the postal worker know a dog is at the next house.
While it's already in place in other states, right now, the Dog Paw program has only been rolled out in two areas of Minnesota, in parts of both Minneapolis and St. Paul. But so far, it's been working well, and could be expanded to other areas of the state, as well, the story said. Postal customers in the pilot program will get a postcard in the mail alerting them they are a part of the program.
Meanwhile, the USPS is actively looking for more workers here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and across the country and has jobs that pay an average salary of $73,000 a year. (Click HERE for more info!)
Having a mailbox with an orange or yellow sticker on it sounds like it could be the answer to a trivia question about Minnesota, doesn't it? Speaking of Minnesota trivia, how many of these Minnesota Jeopardy! questions can you answer correctly? Keep scrolling to find out!
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