Before Christmas I was shipping some items - the gentleman in front of me at the post office had some items packed in a box that had held alcohol in a previous life, and had the information on the box.
The post office wouldn’t let his box be shipped until all alcohol-related information (proof and the like) were covered by a layer of duct tape. I assumed that this had something to do with interstate transport of alcohol laws, but I haven’t come up with anything. Anyone know?
I would assume the same. Probably to do with taxing alcohol…just a WAG though.
You got it right. Right here.
Section 422.11
That’s just a whacky fedaeral rule just for the USPS
UPS etc can ship liquor, maybe. That is, as you say, governed by the intersate transportation of alcohol.
It’s the last vestige of prohibition, BTW
I saw this on the link:
Is a box considered “advertising, promotional, or sales matter that solicits or induces the mailing of intoxicating liquors”? I don’t see how. If you’re mailing a widget, then the box is not being used for any of those purposes; nor would a reasonable person assume that the container is meant to “induce the mailing of intoxicating liquors”.
My husband is a letter carrier for the USPS. He states that even if you tell the clerk at the post office desk that there’s no alcohol in the box, there’s a very good chance that somewhere along the delivery route, someone will see the alcohol labeling on the box and assume that a clerk was lazy, and that they can’t take a chance with accidentally shipping a prohibited substance. Thus your package may well be held up along the way, or even have the postal inspectors called in to open the package. It’s really worth your time to simply blank out anything on the package that might be flagged as prohibited - this includes radioactivity or biohazard markings if you’re using uncontaminated surplus boxes from a lab or hospital, labeling showing guns, and so on.
He had one case where someone did ship wine in an unmarked package. The box wasn’t packed and labeled as fragile properly, and so when it was dropped next to his sorting case, he heard glass break and saw a red pool begin to spread. Postal inspectors were called when he ID’d it as wine, and he thinks charges might have been pressed but can’t be sure on that.
It’s not just alcohol either…I sell alot on Ebay and my brother has an autobody shop so I get my boxes from him. The PO will not accept any boxes that had in their former life anything like oil or any other car fluids at all. I had to rewrap my packages to cover up all the lettering on the boxes or they wouldn’t ship them.
Don’t try using boxes marked DYNAMITE, either. 
Don’t try using boxes still marked anything. Signs in the PO are very clear that any previous writing on any box has to be marked out (mine made me mark over the Amazon.com arrow as well as their name and bar codes).
Joke or not, at the pyrotechnic distributor that I used to work for one of the guys complained about that on more than one occasion. Most of the fireworks came over from China in cardboard cases, so we had a surplus of them. So it was a logical choice to use one when shipping some non-pyro item through FedEx or the mail. On at least one occasion, he got a package returned because the very tips of one of the orange 1.4G or 1.3G placards printed on the box were still showing.
If you can’t mail something, you can’t mail anything else with a label stating that it contains the thing that you cannot mail.
The Postal Service doesn’t care what labels say, unless they say that the package breaks some postal regulation, or contains an address other than the sender and recipient. You can write fragile all you want, or this end up, or open here, or anything you like, although it won’t affect the way your package is handled. You can mislabel things too, and no one cares, as long as you don’t include something that you can’t mail.
All you have to do is wrap that sucker in a layer of brown paper, though.
Tris
So, umm … what happens if someone (not ME, mind you) ships a bottle of wine to a friend for his birthday? Someone (not ME, mind you) did this recently, and the package never arrived. So I heard. What would happen to the package, and the sender (who was not ME, mind you)? Do the USPS workers have an after-hours toast?
Should this hypothetical situation happen, I guess it depends on who discovered it and how. As I stated above, my husband “discovered” the wine because it broke. The postal inspectors were called, but I’m not sure if anything legal was done about it. I would be inclined to believe that nothing major would be done about one bottle of wine. Quite possibly it suffered the same fate - bottle broke en route, package disposed of. It would be very, very unlikely for the wine to have been discovered by any other means other than breakage. This isn’t to say that theft in postal facilities doesn’t occur, but it’s not hugely common, and postal inspectors do observe the workers as well to catch thieves. (From what I’ve heard, credit card/check/cash theft from envelopes is more common.)
It would not be legal for any of the postal workers to take the bottle if it were somehow discovered intact, or to drink it on the property either. Even non-deliverable packages (incorrect address and no proper/legible return address, etc.) must be tossed in a garbage bin inside, and disposed of.
Guess I come from a less trustworthy upbringing: I was always told that it was to keep postal workers from saying, “hey, free booze” and chucking the box behind the table for later opening. Same thing for sending cash.