Your Mistakes Mean Post Office Profits
Do drop a line to somebody--just don’t drop your return address off the envelope. Otherwise, your billet-doux or bill could wind up as a dead letter.
Each year, the U.S. Postal Service receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in undeliverable money. Even though the post office discourages sending cash in the mail, last year’s dead letters contained $975,000 in bills. Only $370,000 was returned to identifiable owners.
Omitting the return address on mail is stamped in U.S. history. In 1890, dead letter offices, which were first opened in 1825, launched a public education campaign about the necessity of return addresses.
Now, more than 100 years later, another campaign couldn’t hurt.
In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service recovery centers, or dead letter offices, handled 102 million pieces of mail out of 198 billion mailed letters, flats (8 by 10 envelopes) and insured parcel post, according to Bob Adams, the postal service’s mail recovery program manager.
When we address letters, it can be far from letter-perfect: We may have omitted the return address and jotted down the recipient’s wrong address, or used the correct address but the person moved without leaving a forwarding address. The local mail carrier then determines that the letter is undeliverable to either the addressee or sender. At that point, the dead letter is bundled off to one of three recovery centers: San Francisco (60,000 square feet), St. Paul, Minn., (35,000 square feet) or Atlanta (66,000 square feet), where 225 employees are allowed to open letters and search for rightful owners.
At the centers, envelopes are first separated by correspondence with and without money by a machine that detects magnetized ink on cash, checks and money orders, and then opened. Nonmonetary correspondence is shredded unless there is a return address inside. If there is a return address--say, on a personal check--then the check will be mailed back to the sender.
Adams said that in 1998, the post office recovery centers returned more than 8 million checks totaling $1.85 billion. Much of that returned mail was due to people paying, for example, a utility bill but leaving off both a return address and stamp so the utility refused delivery. That bill has to be returned to the sender via the recovery center. The other common error, Adams noted, is no return address plus an address that can’t be read in a window envelope.
Let’s say you post a birthday card with a $20 bill inside--without a return address, of course--only to find out that the birthday kid never received the card. You have 90 days from the time you mailed it to fill out a form at a post office describing the card, the amount of cash, the postmark. If a recovery center’s data bank makes a match, it will send you a money order for the amount less the money-order fee.
Undeliverable and unclaimed parcel post--the insured accountable items--must be held by the post office for one year. Thereafter, the contents are auctioned at the three warehouse centers where some employees are auction-school trained.
The merchandise--from Beanie Babies to televisions--has fetched the post office as much as $3 million to $3.5 million in one year.
For auction locations and dates, check out the U.S. Postal Service Web site at https://www.usps.gov.
