Outside In | Hong Kong missed out on this wonderful 1960s technology, and we keep paying for that mistake

At a wonderful Riesling wine tasting at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club last week I decided to order for home delivery a half case of delicious Piesporter Goldtropfchen Riesling Spatlese (yes I live a very privileged life). The agreed Saturday delivery time to Clearwater Bay came and went, and so did the courier – without leaving any wine. Phone calls followed. He could not find the house. New arrangements were made, and he tried afresh on Monday – this time successfully.

This got me thinking. Did the wine merchant carry the cost of two courier trips to distant Clearwater Bay? Or did the courier company bear the cost of first-time failure? Either way, this delivery exercise proved very expensive for someone – and I am sure at some point was built into the price I paid for the wine.

Surely this is not efficient. And surely this delivery challenge would be greatly eased if Hong Kong bothered to introduce postal codes. But here’s the rub: despite investigations in 2000, in 2004 and again in July last year, the Hongkong Post office – and the government and legislators too – Hong Kong remains one of the few economies worldwide without postal codes.

By far the majority of countries without postal codes sit in godforsaken parts of Africa. Among moderately developed economies, only South Africa has failed to introduce. Ireland – long a laggard – at last launched a postal code system in 2015. Eircode provides unique codes for every individual address in Ireland.

Hong Kong often relishes being contrarian, but why on earth should we wish to opt out of a system that everyone else believes is so useful? Some argue that Hong Kong is too small to need postal codes, with just 3 million local residential and commercial addresses. The absence of any standardised form of address format in Hong Kong, and no standard form for street names in English and Chinese, adds complications I understand – though my own sense is that postcodes would help to tackle this problem rather than be frustrated by it. Perhaps more to the point, the Post Office also argues that its current admirable efficiency in getting 99 per cent of letters reliably to their destinations within a day makes postal codes unnecessary. But if Hong Kong is too small to need postal codes, why are they needed in even-smaller Singapore, which has unique postal codes for every house and building in the country.