The postal service makes it really hard to do simple things sometimes
(Like send a large envelope, containing only letters, to Canada)
I have a friend who recently moved from Portland, Oregon, USA to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
I still occasionally use his (now mostly-empty) house as a stopping over point and base of operations, and part of what I do there is grab the mail from his mailbox that hasn’t been forwarded, and drop it into an envelope and forward it on to him.
Now, the USPS has a service for this called “Premium Forwarding Sevice Residental” but I don’t think it works internationally. Right now, if he sees something interesting come in to the box in his Informed Delivery emails, I’m going to either open it locally with his permission, or mail it on. I’m happy to do either. Obviously, I’m not forwarding every grocery-store circular and local event flyer, but anything that looks like directly-addressed mail, with their actual name on it, should go.
Shipping mail along
When I tried to use Shippo.com, or PirateShip.com to send an envelope to Canada, the only option they gave me was to send Global Priority (for north of $30 USD). I didn’t care how fast it got there, nor did I need tracking. But to solve the problem, I just spent the $30, until I could figure it out.
But it wasn’t quite that painless: Even though the stupid customs form on the shipping site asks “What are you sending” and “Documents” is an option, it still wants you to list tariff codes, and a value, and all that other dumb stuff. There’s an explicit expectation that if you’re sending anything at all, it’s merchandise, and I had to go get a shady answer from an AI about which of these “harmonized tariff codes” means “mail”. Dammit, I just said documents!
But $30 every couple weeks to send along a few greeting cards and a bed bath and beyond coupon is expensive.
Instead, I want to mail, the, um…mail, at first class rates, just as I would a large greeting card or a catalog. None of those services existed on those sites.
When I went to look at the USPS web site for these options…they did that stupid thing that they do where they ask for the exact shipping address and postal code, before they’ll show me rates, and then (and only then) did they show me that there’s a “First Class International Large Envelope” option. (Note that the rate does not vary by zone at all, asking me for the address is irrelevant for this class).
Here’s a snippeted screenshot, pay attention to that bottom item.
This is a per-ounce service, with a very weird rate structure:
Weight starts at 3.15 (US) for one ounce, and then increases 50 cents per additional ounce, and tops out at…15.994 ounces.
Because yeah, everyone has a postal scale that goes out to 3 decimal places, right? The short version is that “15.994” is the highest possible weight that you can possibly have on a modern digital scale that shows a single decimal place (like “15.9”) and not have it round up to 16.
Okay, so how do you stamp it?
My goal is to just…leave a bunch of stamps at the house, ready to be used for this task by anyone who comes by. Stuff mail in, weigh the thing with a $20 amazon postal scale, drop it in the outbound box at the curb.
But unless you’re buying postage directly at a Kiosk, these are NOT any kind of stamps you can buy in one shot. These are the kinds of things you want to either go to the counter for, or use a postage meter for, if you have one.
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Looking at the USPS web site, for example, they have $1, $2, $5, and $10, as well as 5 and 10 cent “additional postage” stamps (and they don’t sell these in the post office, I tried), but the amount of lunacy you’d have to stick onto an envelope to get $3.15, you would need…a $1, a $2, a .05, and a .10. Worse still? There’s no .50 cent stamp! So you’d need to stick on an additional .40 and .10 to do a 2-ounce $3.65 mailing.
So let’s talk about the envelope.
Now, you’ll note something interesting in the screenshot above. Their graphic artist made a very weird choice. They used an envelope with a design that has a series of white and red parallelograms around the border. Do you recognize it?
That…is a very special type of envelope, for a thing that no longer exists: Airmail!
Back when mail still commonly went by ship, airmail was a higher-speed option, that had that special envelope to make it easier for hand-sorters to pick out these special envelopes. Often, you would buy the envelope directly from the post office and it had the postage built right in, or you could buy generic ones and use your own stamps, but if you were sending Air Mail, it *had* to be that one.
So, considering every other type of shipping requires a special envelope, and they show a picture of a special (and now very hard-to-find-except-for-novelty-retro stuff), what am I supposed to think here?
They could have used a picture of a manila envelope, or of a variety of envelopes, but instead, they were probably trying to be novel.
It turns out that yes, you can use any kind of envelope and the size doesn’t matter. I’d definitely think “bigger envelope, more money”, but apparently a 6x9, or a 10x12 are the same exact price!
Also note: the USPS *used to* have a first-class rate for merchandise that could fit in an envelope like this (say, a tee shirt), but that option no longer exists.
Also also note: the USPS, despite being “a post office” is starting to really hate stamps. It turns out that just slapping non-barcode stamps on anything over 13 ounces is no longer accepted. Because Homeland Security or something.
So, the final solution
I know I’m chasing an edge case here. It’s a stupid edge case, but I want it solved, because spending less than a hundred dollars to not wait in line at the overworked post office is a “win” in my opinion.
I’m buying:
- A $20 Amazon Basics postal scale, because there’s no standard flat-rate for this BS, and the things that are flat rate are $30+ dollars a shot.
- A bunch of 9*12 tyvek envelopes, because why not shave a bit of weight off versus manila?
- A return-address rubber stamp, and maybe also a rubber stamp that says “Customs: Contains only documents and forwarded mail.” (Or maybe I’ll just take my Zebra printer and make a mass of From/To mailing labels for this purpose).
- An absurd variety of weird-ass stamps that let me do the above you-only-have-a-one-gallon-jug-and-a-one-pint-jug-brain-teaser math. I’m basically buying the equivalent of bills and coins in stamp form. I’m probably going to buy $40-$50 worth of postage to have my little mail center stocked up. I can probably buffer future rate increases by covering the *base* rate with $1.70 international forever stamps, but then I have to do more math to make up the difference. (And of course, two of those…is 3.40 which is too much for the 1-ounce rate, and there are no refunds)
- I’m printing out the above rate sheet, and leaving it, with this pile of stupid postage, and special envelopes and preprinted labels, in the home office.
All this because I hate the concept of waiting on line at the post office to mail what is effectively a letter. Being fair, I also hate wasting everyone else’s time who is on the line. Every person who can think outside the problem of having to wait on that thing, wins for everyone else. If you’re on the line, you’ve failed at your task.
Remember, I’m also the guy who still hand-writes Checks to pay my rent because I don’t trust my bank to give me any kind of confirmation that my landlord has actually received or cashed the check that my bill-pay service would send, but instead just that “the money has been pulled out of my account and stuffed into an envelope”. This is an overengineered solution, but it’s actually optimal. At the end of the day, I satisfy myself with “I’ve thought about every option, and yes, this one is annoying, but it’s the best option I have.”
And, despite all this, buying all that extra postage does actually support the postal service, which I think is a great thing, even if they can be kind of obtuse sometimes.
