Postage Due Rate Of $1.15--Why So High

Hello, I have a question about this cover. Underneath the stamps it seems to read no postage necessary if mailed within the United States. If that is the case then why $1.15 postage due?
Thank you in advance for your help.

Practising...
Guess.
Business proprietor pays for every piece of mail, returned from potential customers,
as stated on the cover.
The Post Office keeps a tally of mail thus received, at the point of this cover, the tally had reached $1.15, and was paid by postage dues.

The business proprietor's account has been balanced.

further guesses.
The Postmaster has jotted receiving mail 28 x 4c and 1 x 3c = $1.15

rod222 is correct that you are looking at the tip of the iceberg.

Typically, the day's worth of Business Reply Mail was banded or trayed, and only the top piece bore the postage due for the whole batch.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Thank you Rod222 and Ikey Pikey for the quick respons. This was very informative and I appreciate it.

Thanks for confirming my guesses.
I wasn't aware it was tallied daily.

Here is Form 3582a in a Postage Due "Bill"
this may have been for larger businesses? tallied perhaps monthly?
This bill $2.82
(Image not mine)

In the infamous 1971 Abbie Hoffman book "Steal This Book' he suggested that people tape bricks to junk mail return envelope/cards to cost the sending firm money. I assume that he was not the first person to think of this; is it possible that someone intentionally attached something to the return envelope that pushed the return past the First Class Mail rate?
Don

To reiterate and repeat a bit, this is simply a "top of the pile" piece which accounted for the rest of the stack.

The business reply mail costs nothing to the sender, but the recipient promises to pay the postage AND a fee through their permit. As you see in the upper left corner "Postage will be paid by the addressee". In 1937 the letter rate was 3 cents and the BRM fee was 1 cent per letter, thus the 4 cents total on each of 28 pieces.

The frequency of accounting would vary. I worked for a company in the 1990s which received its due mail weekly at a rate of about %50.00 each week. I cannot imagine it being any less frequent due to delaying mail, etc. And companies with a large mail volume would do this daily. This is also why there are large quantities (and large multiples) of high value canceled postage due stamps with full gum.

I have a similar cover that served the same purpose except they must not have had any postage due stamps on hand.

For another thread on this topic with a high dollar example, see...

https://goscf.com/t/44866

Mike

Of course, later on they started using meters for postage due.

The image below is of a very unusual usage of a meter for postage due. Someone made the business reply mail person pay for a meter, then stuck it on a piece of paper and then wrote "Postage Due" over it.

Not sure that's in the postal regulations. ;)



There are meter impressions that do include the words "Postage Due" and were created for that use.

The thread linked two posts above shows a full sheet of the $5, J101.

As a sister piece, here is a full sheet of the $5, J78 on a 1937 "postage due bill follow sheet. Wonder what was on the other sheets?

First class mail must 'move' every day.

Allowing Business Reply Mail to pile-up for any number of days would violate this principle.

Moreover, if memory serves (NOT VERY LIKELY, BUT) BRM customers maintained a deposit account with a positive cash balance at the post office. Any *day* that there was BRM mail to process, the clerks would tally the postage due, deduct that amount from the customer's account, and toss the mail at either a) their regular carrier (for route delivery later that day), or b) the post office box clerk (were the mail so addressed).

While local informal arrangements might differ, you should expect every BRM piece bearing postage due to be that day's worth of first class mail to that recipient, with the possible exception of those "whole sheet" bonanzas.

Now, what means "local informal arrangements might differ"?

When my city-bred brother (z"l) first lived in a small town in New England, and the snow came & shut the roads down for days at a time, he was both delighted & horrified when the local postmistress (owner of the general store, operator of a postal counter) called & told him what mail had arrived ... and offered to open & read it. He was too charmed, and too taken aback, to say 'no', so she told him the amount of his electric bill, the amount of his Sunoco credit card bill, and that his mother wanted to know ...

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Edited to add:

When the postage due stamps (or meter imprint) is applied to a single piece of BRM mail, you can safely ass-u-me that the BRM mail was banded, with this piece on top.

When the postage due stamps (or meter imprint) is applied to a an accounting sheet, you can safely ass-u-me that the BRM mail was delivered in a tray or, later, one of those ubiquitous whie plastic bins ... with the accounting sheet on top.