If some puts say two 39¢ stamps on an envelope instead of a single 41¢ stamp or a 39¢ and a 2¢ stamps will the US Postal Service still deliver it?
Yeah, they’ll deliver it, and cancel out the postage, too. They’re no charity.
Yes.
Sure, but no one gets any money back though, if that’s your question. I always just put 2 39 cents (pre-raise) on when mailing a pile of pictures to my father, rather than shclepping to the P. Off. to get 2 oz. postage. He always gets them, but there’s no 4 cent refund attached anywhere.
I am guessing in the ‘post office’ world, there is no such thing as excess postage. There is only sufficiant postage, and insufficiant postage.
I’ve done that a couple of times when I was in a rush. The letters just got delivered, same as usual.
It’s similar to when you buy something with more money than the price and say, “keep the change.”
Just out of curiosity, what if I put 10 41 cent stamps on a postcard- would they be dicks and cancel all ten, or just one?
Or what if you bought a sheet of stamps and folded it up into and envelope and mailed it. Would they cancel all the exposed stamps? Would they unfold the envelope to get to the covered up stamps? Just where do those bastards at the USPS draw the line?
Why would this be dick like behavior? They cancel all postage on the envelope, this isn’t rocket science. You don’t want them canceled, put them inside the envelope.
My mother was an expert at giving her money to the USPS. She only bought first-class stamps and stuck one on for each ounce. She’d give me an envelope to weigh, then ask, “How many stamps does it need?”
They don’t go opening envelopes looking for innocent stamps to cancel.
Or are you envisioning an art project where you take a full sheet of stamps and fold it into an envelope shape? If I had a sheet of penny stamps, I’d try this myself.
A few problems I can see right off - unless you offset the perfs and glue front and back of the “envelope” together, the thing will shred in handling - the stamp perfs probably aren’t going to survive all of the machinery that mail goes through.
Gluing stamps in and of itself invalidates them for any re-use. The USPS considers attempting to remove un-cancelled stamps from an envelope whether it’s been mailed or not every bit as fraudulent as attempting to erase a cancellation mark.
As for how many stamps get canceled? The postal machinery leads off with something called a facer/canceler. This thing optically looks for the stamp, (or postage meter indicia) arranges the envelopes all the same way and cancels the stamps. The assumption is a stamp is at top right on the address side of an envelope.
Our all-stamp envelope may or may not confuse it. It will either see stamps at whatever arbitrary corner of the envelope it first takes a look at, assume the envelope is facing the right way and do nothing more than smack a cancel in the top-right corner, canceling just a few stamps. Or, it may go temporarily batty at the sight of stamps in all corners and kick it out for human intervention.
I’m guessing a single automated cancel will hit somewhere between four and eight stamps. The question is whether a human would count off 41¢ worth and cancel just that many, or if they’d make like a machine gun and cancel every visible stamp.
But remember, the stamps are already “dead” and not re-usable, so it doesn’t really make any difference.
I recall “excess postage” being listed as a hallmark of a suspicious package somewhere, but I don’t recall the details.
I’m pretty sure the cancellation is done by machine. Yeah, machines can be such dicks.
Cite? Are you seriously saying that if I put a stamp on an envelope, then decide not to mail it, it’s illegal for me to remove the stamp and apply it to another envelope?
They are generally pretty expensive, but I have several videos on my computer that can attest to the truth of that.
Yes, that is certainly on the “standard suspicious package identification pamphlet”. I think it has something to do with the perps not wanting to go in to the post office, lest they be identified later. Much easier to just slap double the postage on it, and drop it in a box somewhere that has no cameras.
Other “warning signs” I remember off the top of my head are: protruding wires, leaky or oily package, misspelled address and/or wrong titles, lumpy envelopes, and strange smells. Funny, if I were dumb enough to mail a package bomb, I sure as heck wouldn’t let the wires protrude, I’d spell the names correctly… wait, I just answered my own question.
Almost. They consider it fraudulent to remove and reuse a stamp that was mailed but not cancelled. However, I do believe they assume any stamps that appear to have been reused to be fradulent.
Speaking as an Australian postal worker who specialises in incoming ex-overseas mail, I can assure you that the United States Postal Service is without a doubt one of the most anal organisations on the face of the planet. They are famous for it, and would indeed cancel every stamp on every letter.
We are supposed to do likewise, but are pretty slack about it. As mentioned above, the culler/facer/canceller machine will cancel across the top right-hand corner of the envelope, and often this misses some stamps. Letter stamped in strange places get spat out for a human to deal with, but a few years ago, Australia Post decided it was cheaper to risk having the occasional scrooge steam off a stamp for reuse than it was to employ people to hand cancel all that mail, so we let it go through. Then some professonal busybody types complained that their letters weren’t postmarked, so we are postmarking them all again, but kinda half-arsedly. People doing this job often pass the time by seeing how few impressions they can make to cover the number of stamps (ie. one will cover four if done on the corners). When I’ve done it, I’ve just gone through at speed without taking my mind of the latest cricket scores, but sometimes, if there’s a letter that deserves it - say from a little kid writing to his classmates in Ohio or something, and it’s cute enough - I’ll ink up the handstamp and do a perfect philatelic-grade postmark with the name of the city and state very clear and prominent. These big monolithic organisations do have a heart sometimes.
Interestingly, if I am sorting and see an uncancelled letter, traditionally I was supposed to cancel it myself by striking the stamp through diagonally twice with a ballpoint pen. That practice is no longer used, and we are told to let the letter go through as is.
Good point- you mean they don’t still hand cancel them?