Going Postal

Although I recently reported that everything was going incredibly smoothly when it comes to wedding plans, Melanie and I have finally had our first snafu. Not that it was something horrible, but it was the first thing to be even somewhat problematic. Believe me, I’m not trying to complain. I couldn’t be happier with the way everything is turning out. Or at least not that much happier. But, to fill you in, here’s the shamelessly long story:

As most of you probably know, the United States Postal Service has machines that “read” most of the envelopes that come through their system. This impressive bit of technology allows the separating of mail to be, at least to a large extent, fully automated. Because this has proved such a valuable time saver for the USPS, anyone wanting to mail a sqaure envelope—a shape that alludes the technological prowess of the mail-reading machines—is subsequently punished by paying an extra twelve cents per parcel. Melanie and I were already aware of this extra cost when we ordered our wedding announcements. We knew they would cost $.49 a piece to be mailed. But, to be honest, we were more than happy to pay the extra postage when the company that printed our announcements told us we could have the post office do the actual stamping for us. Rather than spending several hours affixing the stamps ourselves, we could take our announcements en masse to a local post office and be done with it. We were overjoyed.

Come last Tuesday morning, Melanie and I take our stockpile of announcements to the local PO. After waiting in line for several minutes, we reach the counter and gleefully deposit our box of envelopes before the USPS employee, asking him to please stamp and mail the contents thereof. The man working the counter then informs us that, contrary to what we may have heard, the post office is not able to handle such requests. We can either buy the stamps and put them on ourselves, or we can drive down the road to a printing store that, for a nominal fee, will stamp them and mail them for us. Having basked in the mentality that we were about to be done with the whole affair, Melanie and I promptly decide it is worth the extra cost to have the print shop do our dirty work. Somewhat disgruntled but ever full of hope, we drive down the road.

When we arrived at Printing Express, I once again heaved the box into my manly arms and, with my beautiful fiancée in tow, proceeded into the store. Much to our dismay, the woman working the counter tells us that Printing Express is not able to handle such requests. She does inform us, however, that we can drive down the road to the post office and, for no fee whatsoever, have them stamp and mail our announcements for us. Understandably frustrated, Melanie and I return to the car, where Melanie proceeds to call the company that had originally printed our announcements. She explains the situation and asks if a particular post office must be patronized in order to have our needs met. The woman on the phone tells us of her own first-hand experience with a post office that both stamped and mailed her invitations, and, in a miraculous twist of fate, she tells us the location—about a mile due east of where we are sitting.

We quickly drive to our next location and position ourselves in the unsettlingly long queue. After a dozen minutes or so, we finally reach the counter. Not wanting to provide the postal representative any ammo with which to decline us, we politely request (rather than ask) that she handstamp and mail our box of wedding announcements. Like the man at the original post office, she is quick to inform us that this is not an option, but that we can most certainly use this opportunity to buy the stamps that, at our own convenience, we can adhere manually. Standing fast, we assure her that we had been told the post office could handle our handstamping request. Caving under our pressure, the woman concedes that she can handstamp our announcements, but, in what seemed a bit of improv on her part, she informs us that the Post Master General has limited such handstamping to twenty envelopes per customer. If we really want them to do this, she says, we will have to go through the line over and over until we are finished. Not wanting to be outdone, I promptly take my position back in line while Melanie waits for our first twenty letters to be processed.

Is all well that ends well? Far from it. By the term “handstamping,” Melanie and I had understood that the postal employee could use an actual rubber stamp to quickly imprint a “postage paid” label on our announcements. As it turns out, in order to handstamp an envelope, the postal employee must place an individual piece of mail on her scale, type the zip code to which it is being mailed into the computer, enter some other information, and then wait for the computer to print out a sticker that gets placed on the envelope. She must do this one unit at a time, regardless of matching zip codes or any other similarities. Needless to say, we quickly learned that an abundance of time could be saved by purchasing the stamps and doing it ourselves. In the end, they had won. We forfeit.

Is the story over? Not quite. By the time we had reconciled to doing the stamping ourselves, we were fully aware that $.49 stamps did not even exist. In order to obtain the proper postage, Melanie and I would be forced to buy nearly 200 $.48 stamps and the same number of $.01 stamps. Our stamping efforts would be doubled, but forgoing the handstamping “service” offered via the post office would still be well worth our time. What we didn’t realize (until it was too late) is that self-adhesive $.01 stamps are also non-existent. So, having already made the decision and ordered the stamps, we find out that we’ll also have to tear each $.01 stamp from its perforated stronghold and taste of its bitter poison in order make it stick. Our loss, it turns out, was more brutal than we had imagined.

I think Melanie is quite right in supposing that the non-availability of $.49 stamps is a postal conspiracy. As the post office is fully aware that square envelopes require this exact amount of postage, and as wedding announcements are likely to compose a large amount of USPS business now that electronic communication is all the fad, how can it be that $.49 stamps do not exist? Interestingly, Melanie and I had three different postal employees at two different locations try to sell us on buying $.60 stamps, “just to avoid the hassle of putting two stamps on every invitation.” From what they said, it seems a lot of people do this, and I’m not surprised. Had we known the $.01 stamps were rip-and-lick, we very well may have purchased the $.60 stamps ourselves. Anytime anyone does this, of course, it brings in an extra $.11 per invitation for the post office, which would certainly add up to a decent amount of revenue at year’s end. But I suppose it’s just like every other establishment, whether a bakery or a dress shop—if you know someone’s buying something for a wedding, there is no such thing as price gouging.