Why do bill collectors send payment envelopes with the clear windows? Its tough to get everything aligned so that you can see the address clearly. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to just print the address on the outside on the envelope?
I’ve often wondered that too.
Or else just the company name needs to line up with the window; the street address is pre-printed on the envelope.
But this next weirdness was resolved by a postal employee: I noticed that on some envelopes in the upper-left a return address was already filled out. It was the same as the address I was sending it to. He said this was so that if it were accidentally mailed without postage, the payment would still go to the company. I asked, “Isn’t that inviting fraud?” He just shrugged.
Bill collectors don’t bother me any more since I printed up a death certificate from my ‘estate’ and sent a copy to all of them. But in the old days, it was so they didn’t have to print the same information twice. They WANT you to send them money so they don’t make it overly difficult to get the bill back in the envelope with the address side out.
By placing the address on the internal receipt, they guarantee that you will actually return their paperwork, appropriately filled out. I imagine that before they did this they would often open an envelope and have a hansdful of bills spill out – with no indication of who sent them. It’s a wa of idiot-proofing the system.
But, as a friend of mine once said, “It’s impossible to ake anything FoolProof, because Fools are so ingenious.”
Probably more information than you wanted to know.
Use the phone company as an example. Somewhere in your city, there is a clearing house that handles all of the payments sent in for your phone bill. If you used the return envelope, then you were forced to put the bill back in the envelope in a certain way. Your personal check then has to go behind that.
First a machine is used to cut open the edge of the envelope. A little puff of air is blown in there which allows the machine to remove the contents of the envelope. Ultimately you have a stack of 99% of the phone bills in order as bill, check, bill, check… You get the idea.
The clerks get a batch of payments and sit at a big machine. They drop the bill into the left side of the machine, with their right hand they key in the amount of the check.
You cut the processing time of pulling checks out of bills to almost nothing because the clerks hardly have to seperate the paperwork anymore.
Anything that can’t get handled that way falls into “special handling” batch.
Oh, and of course, the clerks are measured by how many payments they can process.
Regarding the envelope windows though, I’ve never come across one with the return address pre-printed. They do, however, all have the same “Did you remember?” steps on the back (enclose payment, write account number on check, stamp envelope). This leads me to believe that the simple reason why they use windows is that window envelopes can be bought from the printer cheaper than custom printed envelopes and can be delivered in less time.
Sure thing, Jophiel. If the company in question has more than one office they can negotiate a bigger volume discount by using the same envelope enterprise-wide. It could be quite a bit of money if you’re talking several hundred thousand envelopes.
Another thing is to prevent paying for empty envelopes (if it’s one of those “No postage necessary” envelopes). Whenever I get junk mail with return cards or envelopes like that, I drop them blank and empty into the mail, so the company has to pay for postage on something completely worthless. Makes me feel better, anyway.
The school newspaper often has these types of inserts, which end up in big piles all over campus. Whenever I go by a pile, I grab a handful and throw them in the mail.
But obviously, if the address spot is a clear window, you can’t do that.
If the return envelope has a postal bar code printed on the front, it will get there even without and address.
You could stick the stub in backwards, and it will still get there.
There is a special “bar code” that you’ll see at the top of the envelope, a couple or three thick vertical lines. That tells the postal scanners to look for a postal bar code first for proper routing.
Now, that’s just for delivery. I don’t know whether all the mail processing machines at the payment center require the stub to be in a certain position.
Most return envelopes have the bar code on the insert, not the envelope.
The processing explanation doesn’t quite hold water, since window envelopes pre-dated that current process.
One reason not mentioned is that you can buy enormous quantities of envelopes and not have to worry about throwing them out if you move your billing address.