I understand why bills are mailed to you in envelopes that have little windows in them, because this design allows the sender to use just one type of envelope for everyone, saving them money.
But why do the return envelopes you’re supposed to mail back to them have those little windows. You have to line up the payment stub with the window just to show THEIR ADDRESS, which they could have just as easily printed on the envelopes in the first place. And I’m sure a lot of bills get lost in the mail because the sender doesn’t line up the return address in the little window correctly.
Probably so that they can use the envelopes for a variety of different purposes and sort them by department on receipt without opening them (does the address that you have to line up with the window say ‘accounts department’ or ‘payments’ or something?)
As Mangetout noted, the companies might have multiple lock boxes. An oil company might have separate places to send payments for private card-holders, corporate card-holders, and fleet card-holders. A very large retail outfit might have separate locations on the east and west coasts and a place in the center to handle the large volume of incoming mail.
Buying unaddressed envelopes with windows means that
a) they do not need to pay special for envelopes for each location, reducing their costs for buying in bulk and
b) they do not need to set up a print run for envelopes that is separate from the print run for invoices (and then match the proper invoices to the proper printed (or pre-printed) envelopes.
One of the main reasons to use the window envelopes is to make sure that you include the slip with the address when mailing in the payments. The payment slip has all the information on it that they need to process the payment, and it can be time consuming to match payments to accounts otherwise.
I don’t know that the possibility that the payer might align it wrong is a disincentive to the biller.
In other words, if the bill payer aligns the slip wrong and the check gets lost, then the biller can charge the payer a late fee.
I’m not trying to suggest a conspiracy or anything, but the fact that an occasional check might get lost in the mail isn’t bad for the biller, so they don’t really have an incentive to go to the bother and expense of printing envelopes.
I’d bet it’s mostly what JeffB said and the fact that there are bound to be loads of people out there who can’t address a letter correctly even if their life depended upon it.
I always just assumed that the cost of a window envelope (which can be purchased companies which produce generic window envelopes in mass quantities) is considerably cheaper than the cost of specially printed envelopes.
They’re going to send you a bill with their address on it anyway. And, like Green Bean says, if you don’t make sure the address is visible, it is you, the bill payer, who absorbs the cost. And JeffB’s suggestion rings true to me, too.
While Mangetout and tomndebb’s explanation is true for some companies, I don’t think it’s true in general. I get window return envelopes from several local, low-rent businesses who are very unlikely to have a complex system like that.
There might also be a bit of a cultural thing happening, too, that window envelopes seem “businesslike” and “professional” to people. If a company was considering printing up return envelopes with their addresses on them, they might rejct that idea for aestetic reasons, because it’s not the way everybody else does it. (That’s a total WAG.)
The reason is that rather than paying to print smaller runs of envelopes with addresses on them, you’re only printing addresses on the bills. You have to print the bills anyway.
You can then buy generic window envelopes in bulk, cutting way, way down on price. Different divisions of the company can use the same envelopes, which leads to even more cost reduction.
If your address changes or company info changes in any way, you don’t have to trash and reprint the envelopes.