Belgium Does Not Cancel

My wife averages a couple of packets of stamps a week from Matthijs a Belgian stamp dealer....hes puts nice stamps on the envelopes..they are the pre euro ones...must be still valid for postage...the thing is...THEY ARE NEVER CANCELLED !! What a waste !

Unfortunately a number of Postal Authorities around the world are like this now - I have had letters from the US and UK with nice stamps that have not been cancelled

I run into the same problem with shipments coming in from Canada. So hard for me to get a properly cancelled modern Canadian stamp these days. Normal-sized flat mail gets cancelled OK, but anything else doesn't get cancelled unless the sender wrestles the postal clerk to the ground.

My friend in Canada somehow gets the kid in the covenience store to put a nice cancel on my stamps !

Don't complain Phil.

When I get international mail with uncanceled stamps, my local mail carrier whips out a ball-point pen and desecrates the entire cover

I have to admit that the postal clerks here in my town are now on to the idea, I want my stamps cancelled. So, any time I get a cover covered with stamps that are not cancelled, they will cancel them for me.

There is now one problem with that though, and, that is even for a parcel that came from the U.S. or the U.K. or even other countries for that matter that are not cancelled, they will cancel them as well.

I can't really complain about this though since it took me so long to convince them to cancel them instead of them ussing the dreaded felt marker or pen markings, so, I leave it as it is. <G>

Chimo

Bujutsu

I just two pieces in the mail today, one from here in Canada and one from the USofA, both uncanceled. Seems to be an international conspiracy!

i send my unused Canada back home..where they are gratefully received !!

I think it is a combination of many factors.

1) The postal administrations are out to save money on ink sometimes.

2) The envelopes anyway that are not cancelled by Canada here seem to mostly always have the fluorescent bar-coding on the bottom of the front and/or back, that helps in sorting and identification of which facility the envelope came through.

3) So maybe the fluorescent cancels (bar-codes) are the new way of telling where the mail has been rather than the older visible CDS and even spray-on ink-jet cancels the stamps had.

and
4) Perhaps the Post Offices have done their economics math and realized that the amount of stamps that do not get cancelled and then reused is trivial compared to the amounts made by the sale of the stamps. It has been factored into the price of the stamp(s).

Personally I wish everyone would take some pride in how their mail delivered looks to their customers and use nice eye-pleasing cancels on every piece of mail every time everywhere. Even if delivery people had little special shaped cancels with letters or numbers like the old Paris, France ones used to cancel the mail that didn't get cancelled by the sorting facilities.

The reliance on machines and business priorities almost always, in all businesses, dictates whether a task is important or not and gets done or not.

I think giving each person their own canceller device would increase employee satisfaction in the long run. I would want one if I was working for a Post Office, that's for sure. It would add to the desire to receive personal mail when you knew you would also see a fancy cancel sometimes perhaps.

I also would like the reintroduction of hammers to cancel the mail as the effect of the now-in-us rubber cancelling stamps gives one a smeared, non-readable cancel more often than not.

Perhaps a tactic by the spray-on machines sales people so they can say, well, if you use our machines you can read the cancels a lot better than now. Although we all know that these machines seem to be able to be set to run at faster speeds than makes for a good readable cancel, making one think again that something else is used now to determine where and when a piece of mail has been serviced.

I just received this cover from the UK with only two of the eight stamps having been cancelled.

What I find even more amazing is how the 13p 25th Anniversary in the upper right escaped cancellation (out of deference to the Queen perhaps?).

This one came yesterday including a stamp with modern windmills on it..a nice clean cancel would have looked good..but I guess no one has time !!