I’m just curious. If I were out of stamps but desparately needed to get something mailed/postmarked that day … could I tape 33 cents (soon to be 34) to the envelope where a stamp would normally go – and expect the letter to arrive as if I put a stamp on there? One would think a post office employee could simply take the money off and put a stamp on (much like if someone in person walked up to the counter with 33 cents and said “give me a stamp please”), but I dunno … this IS the Post Office after all!
The answer is, as usual, it depends.
Where are you mailing the letter? Are you putting it into a pick up box or leaving it in your personal mailbox?
I am a rural mailcarrier and do this for customers several times a day. Provided the change stays attached to the letter, I’d say, no problem. I wouldn’t drop it into one of the big blue pickup boxes though. If it falls off, you’ll get the letter back in a couple of days with a “needs postage” message on it.
It sounds to me like there are many cases where, by friendly arrangement between the mail carrier and the customers, carriers will do things that aren’t strictly part of their job and thus they aren’t really obliged to do. The mail carriers for certain apartment houses like mine will pick up mail left stuck into a particular corner between the mail boxes and the wall, although that isn’t strictly part of their job (and there’s a street mail box only a couple of hundred feet from the building). Some rural mail carriers will put stamps on the letters if you leave them the exact change for the stamp, although again this isn’t actually part of their job. A lot of what’s done depends on friendly agreements rather than the requirements of the job.
Hmmm… if you taped thirty three cents to the letter, now the letter would weigh more, hence you’d have to pay more. Mathematically speaking, you could try and figure out the weight of the coins attched in relation to the cost of sending the… oh, nevermind.
Pretty much every time the postal rates change, there’s a photo in the newspaper of a letter with coins taped in the corner. The accompanying caption always says the Post Office ordinarily doesn’t deliver such mail (though, we are left to assume, they’ll make a small handful of exceptions in the days immediately following the rate change.)
…of a time recently when I got a small package from somebody. It was delivered to my home during the day, when I wasn’t there. I arrived that evening to find the package on the porch, and a weird note in the mailbox.
The handwritten note was on a small USPS envelope with a layout of checkboxes and info blanks (like you see on those “Sorry, we missed you,” forms. I don’t recall the exact wording, but it essentially said: “This package we just left you was shy of postage. Would you mind leaving 38 cents in this envelope for the carrier to pick up tomorrow?”
I was kind of amused, and the amount was trivial, so I put appropriate coinage in the envelope and left it in my mailbox the next day. It was apparently picked up, and I heard no more about it.
Actually it IS part of a rural carriers job to sell stamps.
I don’t know about city carriers, because I’m not one.
No one would weigh an envelope and charge additional postage for the coins to be used for postage. And no one would CANCEL the tape over the coins. I admit, we aren’t all geniuses, but fercrissakes we are smart enough to take the coins off and put a stamp on!
And it is common for rural carriers, at least, to pay for your postage due items and ask you nicely to reimburse us. Otherwise we would leave a notice for you to go to the post office and pick it up yourself, after paying the clerk. Of course this depends on the amount and whether you have stiffed us before!
