USPS Customs Forms - Dont Recognize 'Philatelic'

I am trying to return an approval selection I got from a UK dealer. As in the past I went to the USPS site and tried to fill out the form online and download it. It took two hours. It kept tossing me for one technicality after another. It is, like most of their other online forms, obtuse and unintuitive. I finally managed to get it to where I could download it.

I am laid up with an ankle sprain so my wife took it to the substation in the store where we usually do our shopping. Not some little mom and pop place, a large supermarket. They would not accept it for mailing. Seems they have a new USPS computer program for these they have to use. I had it specified as 'Philatelic Material'. The clerk didn't know what that meant, she explained it was stamps. He apparently could not get the USPS system to accept it using either term. He wound up telling her to take it to a regular post office.

In our case that is several miles away and is always jammed with passport applicants. Last time I took something there I waited over an hour.

Has some major change taken place with USPS and overseas mail? This just seems utterly ridiculous..

That's not that bad. I had sold some Hummels about 10 yers ago to a collector in Germany. They are marked "West Germany" so for accuracy I put the country of origin as "West Germany". It was refused by German Customs with the comment of "No such Country of Origin" and was returned to me.

That's almost as bad as getting an outgoing letter returned, hand-marked "return for postage".

It was franked with four of these 13c US stamps:


This has happened many times, unfortunately. The USPS is promoting stamp collecting yet making it extremely difficult in many ways to do so.

--Jim Wentzell
stampguyaps177-681

Hi Jim

If you want idiotic, try the Merchant's Walk post office branch. They used to have knowledgeable and good people, the new batch are something else (except one who always seems to be on break).

Same people who told me that rolling up a marked "do not fold" manila envelope into a tight cylinder is not folding it The lockers are right next to my box.

erry B

Keep this link handy:
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/f...icp061_3.pdf

Philatelic Material can be imported duty free:
https://hts.usitc.gov/?query=9704

I am making one more attempt to mail this package this week and if I still run into idiotic issues plan to contact the sender and see how they want this handled. The mailing consists of four small approval books and I may try to seperate them into two smaller packages and mail separately with no documentation.

This may have been a case of incompetence st the substation and I may well be able to complete mailing at a regular postal location. It occurs to me that my days of shipping overseas- certainly of receiving approvals from overseas- may be over.

Got it mailed today, took to a regular PO and was in and out in five minutes.

The issues at the substation were apparently not with the USPS but with some clerk who hadn't been trained on some new software. I like happy endings.

I'm convinced that the words "do not fold" and "do not bend" are essentially meaningless to postal employees. If you want something not to be folded or bent, it needs to be packed so that it CANNOT be folded or bent. I've received many items from ebay sellers who don't seem to understand this.

That's correct. They can't be expected to comply with any "etiquette" marking because virtually all mail is not human handled at key points in the process. Those markings may influence treatment by the recipient, though, such as staff in a corporate mail room, so they have some utility.