Zone pricing / zone skipping.

Domestic parcel rates are banded by distance rather than charged by the mile: the carrier reads a zone off a chart using origin and destination, and the same weight costs more as the band climbs. USPS takes the band from the first three digits of the destination ZIP code (USPS Domestic Zone Chart). Zone skipping is the shipper doing part of the line-haul itself: palletising a pre-sorted load, trucking it near the customers, and handing it over there so the carrier only bills the short leg. USPS sells those entry points as Parcel Select destination entry, priced at the sectional center facility, the destination hub, or the delivery unit itself (DMM 253). It needs steady volume into one region, which a print-to-order factory rarely has, so the POD version of the same idea is choosing where to print rather than where to inject: a second production site near the customers moves the zone before the parcel exists.