[ Complaining ] Canadian & US Routing Codes Overlap Causing Delays For Letters

*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***
This is just me venting a bit ... myself and others who purchase light weight items from Canada oftentimes experience extreme delays in receiving our letters.
It turns out that the routing codes for both Canada and the US are printed in the same place, leading to letters being thrown into the 'manual sort' bin and forgotten about for a long time.
I purchased two semi-rare postcards from Canada over 3 weeks ago, and just received 'em today :(
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Three weeks for cross border with contents doesn't seem horrible. I live in Ontario. When I was very active buying auction lots from Virginia and Minnesota it was normal to take an entire month to get them. The first week to get them into the mail and three weeks for them to get to my house. Now customs gets their mitts on them and charges tax a second time. I see in the photo how it's near impossible to read the lapped codes. That needs to be fixed.

Athough we cannot see the overall size, thickness, stiffness and weight (helps to get fuller information) one can detect there are a lot of moving parts here ...
1. The sender did not help the situation by applying stamps in the typical barcode area. Being a seller with some philatelic knowledge, They should have known better. The fact that some of the barcode falls on a black stamp may have rendered the barcode unreadable and was a significant cause of the delay.
2. It appears there is a "Do not bend" message at the left, thus this may have been in the "manual sort" bin from the start and not readily machineable (despite the later application of barcodes), and that a considerable amount of the delay may fall to the seller's choices of packing, stamping and handing instructions.
3. We don't have dates on how long this was in the hands of Canada Post, Customs, or the USPS, so really hard to access "blame".
4. Conversely on the credit side of the ledger, it is hard to characterize the situation from 1 mail piece. We often hear complaints about the timing or routing of one item, yet fail to mention the 100s of successes. I would challenge anyone to design and implement a system to handle billions of items perfectly when there is little standardization of size/weight.
5. Often a strip of opaque tape is applied to create a "fresh" area for the most recent barcode. That might have been helpful here.
6. Bottom line, it's more than just the overlapped barcodes.

As a general tidbit, I would also add that Canada became much more strict on guidelines for lettermail starting around 2022. Anything with stiffener or "do not bend" may be held longer and inspected and/or sent back to the sender if it is determined or suspected to be anything other than basic paper materials not involving a transaction. It is expected those types of items should be sent by a packet/parcel of some kind with customs forms, etc.

It would be interesting to see how quickly a piece like that shown above moved through the system prior to 1990 when address specific barcodes first came into use. Not sure I buy any volume related excuses for poor performance. First Class mail volume (not broken down by sub-type) is now at late 1960's levels and as a matter of fact is currently at its lowest level since 1969.

Hmmm. Nobody mentioned that the bar code seems to have been double-struck...

As noted above by others, the Canadian and American postal services applied their respective barcodes in the same place (over each other).

It's in the thread's title.

Although the OP has not returned to provide any additional information or feedback, I will stand by my observations that the sender was the first domino in the delay process by their mailpiece design. Mail must be machineable to get handled quickly.

@John Becker
I am not sure what you are talking about. The letter was stamped in Canada and received a Canadian routing code on the bottom middle. The letter was than transferred through the CBP checkpoint into USPS custody, were it received a second routing code in the exact same spot as the previous routing code printed by the Canadian National Postal Service.
The problem is that the routing codes for both Canada and the United States are printed in the same location, leading to international mail ( non-parcel) being significantly delayed due to two different routing codes being printed overtop of each other. The issue has absolutly nothing to do with the Canadian sender.

I can see where placing the stamps in an area not traditionally supposed to receive them could interfere with the barcode reading. Not an expert on this but it makes sense.

RLS,
Excuse me????????
You come here and post a tiny snippet of a cover with a preconceived notion of exactly why it took longer than you expected io get delivered and THEN push-back when you get a reply which took considerable investment of time and effort to make, but which MIGHT point to other factors based on many decades of studying postal hsistory. I call B.S.

First, SHOW the entire cover when you ask a postal histroy question.
Second, You provide NO data on how long it was in the hands of Canada Post, Customs, or the USPS. Nor do I suspect you know. Yet apparently USPS is the only factor to blame? Again, this is likely to be B.S. Yes, I agree, the overlapped barcodes do not help, BUT I believe there are likey contributing factors, some I outlined before.
Third, a full illustration will also show the complete marking to the left side.
Fourth, members respond here because we try to be helpful, not for the pay, ego, or resume filler.
FIfth, the moon is not full and my knickers are not in a twist.

Bottom line: SHOW US THE FULL COVER! And yes, I know I am shouting this.

So... lighten up...

Nope. When someone provides partial information, then pushes back, they deserve to be called out.