Why Won't The Post Office Cancel The Stamps?

Hello

I bought some stamps from a dealer in the USA, and for the second time his stamps are not canceled.
I did notice a barcode at the bottom.
Any ideas?

Australia post do the same they send thousands of letters overseas and miss cancelling the stamps they use machines and that's most of the problem. The machines don't know they missed cancelling them and there seems to be no visual check either by postal workers. Quiet often I get letters from USA or UK with stamps not cancelled. I don't actually mind them not cancelling the stamps what I hate is when the postman strikes through all the stamps with a pen or texta and destroys them. The post office boss here earns over 5 million a year you think they could get it right and cancel the stamps but they don't. As a result you find thousands of unfranked stamps floating around. Many of the people that buy from me always comment the stamps were not cancelled when they get their ebay winnings from me.

Thanks for the info.

JMO: The size of the item, the placement of the stamps, and the destination all played a part in the non-cancellation. The envelope (if under 16 oz.) was probably placed in a street collection box. When picked up, the piece was co-mingled with other collected mails, put in a small hamper, & sent to a central processing center. Here it was dumped onto an automated culling belt which removes large, non-letter size items. (at the end of the belt, the letter size mails are faced & machine cancelled). With the size & foreign address it was probably manually culled out & tossed to a foreign sort hamper & sent for manual sorting to a foreign section, getting placed into an Israel sack, pulled when full, sent to the nearest international airport for a trip to that country. Once in country local postal officials just made the delivery. Placement of the stamps has a significant impact on whether a piece gets mechanically postmarked or manually pen cancelled, and being a foreign destination also played into this I'm sure.

Its not worth the cost of the shpritzy ink.

The PSA (Pressure-Sensitive Adhesive) has pretty much solved the re-use problem.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Not in Australia the recent mint no gum stamps are alive and well.

So why do people buy a 5kg lot from me full of the same all cancelled definitive stamp set?

Basically if it's machinable, it gets cancelled (most of the time). If it's not machinable, it rarely gets cancelled. If you want non-machinable parcels to get cancelled, you basically have to hand it to a clerk and ask them to do it.

When I get mail with uncancelled stamps I just ask the postal clerk to hand stamp them for me. They are so use to me now that they just hand me the canceller and I put the cancellation on the stamps. I do a very nice job. The clerks, not so much, more like killer cancels.

I regret to say that if the Royal Mail (or its automated machinery) declines to cancel stamps, as it so frequently does, then those stamps are fair game for re-use by this customer. Ultimately, though, and in not too long a time, stamps for postage in the UK will be a thing of the past.

The few times that I have tried that, the clerks refused. Seemed to think it improper as it would show the wrong date.

Yes it is a pain when you have a hostile Post Office when it comes to getting stamps cancelled.

It could be worse .... https://goscf.com/t/3853

In a way, having the pen or the marker destroying a stamp, is somewhat our fault as philatelists: Cancellation was the post office's way to... cancel the used stamp. Now days the post office does so with pens too, due to the automated way of sorting mail.
We as collectors decided that pen cancelled stamp is destroyed, while actualy the postman did his (lazy) job. Pen cancelled stamp is nowdays one of the official ways to cancel stamp - why dim it as ruined?

Pen cancels are lazy... they don't provide the "audit" trail of date, time, place that makes the cancelation unique and imaginary.

Alternatively, I guess you could by yourself a cancellation stamp with whatever DTG you wanted and cancelled your stamps ... "Yuma, AZ, 3:10, 1957" or whatever.

The amount of pen cancels in Australian kiloware has increased a great deal sadly.

Obviously the postal clerk couldn't find the Sharpie...