Reason Why USPS Is Losing Money, 70 $ Free Shipping ;-)

i received some books on Well Fargo I ordered from Phil (i highly recommend him!)

USPS did not bother to cancel the 70+ $ shipping fee stamps

so it can be used again, and again.....

strange thing, here at the post office pick up point in the Netherlands when I picked it up they even had a comment on it

Face postage is an interesting thing if you think about it. In the 1990's the USPS received the money for the $9.95 Eagle stamps which were not used right away. Fast forward twenty to thirty years and Phil buys the postage for 50 percent of face and the USPS finally performs the service. It would be very interesting to know what it would have cost to mail the same package twenty years ago. And of course inflation rears it's head. All very interesting.

Most of the stamped mail I get these days is not cancelled.

interesting reading...here (netherlands) I am not seeing it at all that's why it stood out

This is not atypical. I've recently received stamped mail from Canada, Great Britain, Australia and more without cancellation.

Non-cancellation was true of the US for a lot of mail delivered to businesses for many years before this. The USPS probably figured everything would just be thrown in the trash. The last person to potentially cancel mail in the US has always been the mail carrier, now hated as Marker Monkeys.

The primary reason USPS is losing money is the requirement by the US Congress to pre-fund medical benefits for retirees. No other government agency has to do this. Not canceling stamps is a very small part of the equation.

Because it's a package with books, it did not go through an automatic-cancelling machine. So it had to be hand cancelled and someone forgot to do that. U.S. mail people are told to hand cancel or even pen cancel any uncanceled stamps they see (much to the frustration of collectors who don't like pen cancels) but someone forgot to do that, as well. Out of tens of millions of articles of mail some do get through without being canceled properly, it's true. But that's hardly the reason for the financial problems of the USPS which has bigger problems than that. So I don't think we should elevate this mistake into this kind of argument. I rarely get uncanceled mail. Some of my mail is pen canceled, but only occasionally. Even in the Netherlands, postal clerks are supposed to cancel uncanceled stamps. I get pen canceled foreign mail here in the U.S. from time to time, so some American postal person must have done that.

As for reusing stamps, it's illegal so not recommended!

And finally, a pet peeve of mine. Currency amounts should have the dollar sign before the amount, not after it. (Sorry, former teacher, and I can't help myself)