Why don’t creditors such as the Phone Company, the local Gas/Water/Sewer/Public service companies use pre-paid return envelopes? They could charge their customers for the postage, consumers wouldn’t have to worry about having stamps to pay a bill, and they would likely get paid (overall) sooner.
I pay those services online. I wouldn’t like getting charged for postage when I wouldn’t even use the envelopes, unless they actually discriminated and only added the extra charge to customers receiving paper statements (which they probably wouldn’t).
Here in Australia (and maybe in the US too for all I know), you will often see reply pre-paid envelopes for charities that have a little note on them saying “your use of a stamp saves us double postage”. So you don’t have to use a stamp but they like it, because the post office has high admin fees for receiving reply paid mail.
So I think a clue to your answer might lie in that. For the charities, the difference between a person not having a stamp lying about close handy and their having one available might represent the difference between getting a large donation and not getting one at all. For your local gas company, you owe them money, and if you don’t pay, they’ll go after you, so they can safely assume that you’ll pay on or close to time, and it’s not worth the extra post office fees or the risk of annoying their customers by passing on those fees in the form of higher prices.
I see on review, the OP mentioned “pre-paid” not “reply paid”.
If they sent out pre-paid envelopes, them you could just white out the address and use it to send a letter to great-aunt Selma.
Another thing is the utilities actually want mailing to be inconvenient so that they can drive their customers to use the internet or scheduled regular payments from their bank accounts - both of which are of benefit to the company.
It would be unfair to those people who pay online, for starters.
Also, reply-paid (aka business return mail) is just an invitation to certain misfits who stuff crap into the envelopes and mail them back to the business, forcing the business to pay to receive an envelope full of expired grocery store coupons.
Pet peeve: for people who do pay by automatic bank withdrawal, don’t you think they could sort by that and not include a return envelope at all?? If the point is to save resources?? My electric bill, which urges me not to pay it by check as I am signed up for Electripay, still includes a return envelope.
Probably an element of it is that they would prefer not to have to reflect postal rate increases in your bill.
Some do work that way. With my phone company, for example, I can opt out of receiving a paper bill altogether and have my statement emailed to me. Note that you have to specifically opt out; simply signing up for online bill payment is not sufficient
At one time, the utilities did provide pre-paid envelopes. For the (only!) phone company in Chicago, this was discontinued back in the 70s. IIRC, it was due to the rising cost of postage The History of Postage Rates in the United States since 1863. I do remember that, for a while, people sent the bills without postage, and the phone company accepted them anyway. This stopped when the phone company announced they would refuse payments with postage due.