Return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone

By John Toth

The Bulletin

An invoice I sent out in June just came back to me marked as “undeliverable.”

Maybe it was, but why did it take such a long time for me to get it back? It was addressed to the same business with whom we have previously dealt with a number of times, and my invoices were always deliverable before. What was the difference this time?

I looked up our client’s email address, screenshot the invoice and sent it off to him, this time for free. (The cost of a first-class stamp is now 73 cents. A first-class stamp cost 29 cents in 1994, when we started publishing The Bulletin.)

This is not the first time this has happened. We get about three or four invoices back in the mail each year marked as undeliverable, even though the clients have been receiving our correspondences routinely for many years.

Every time this happens, I email them the same invoice and explain that the hard copy (that they still like to get) came back.

Mistakes happen. Heck, just open up any newspaper, and you’ll find plenty of mistakes (except in this one - not). People put together the newspaper, and people handle mail. They’re going to make mistakes.

The post office has set out to fix this problem.

According to Parcel, an industry newsletter that I happened to come across, “The USPS is revising its delivery performance targets for 2025, reducing its on-time goals for both first-class, two-day mail (from 93% to 87%) and three-to-five-day mail (from 90% to 80%).”

So, they just lowered the delivery expectation goals - problem fixed.

They didn’t say how long an “undeliverable” piece of mail should take to be returned to sender, but I asked Google’s AI this question, and this is what it found.

“For standard mail, it could take a few days to a couple of weeks, while special handling services have specific hold periods (e.g., 15 days for Certified Mail) before the item is returned to the sender.”

Last year, I wrote a column about a winner of the Moody Gardens Festival of Lights who never received his tickets. The letter we sent him with the tickets inside was returned to us two years later.

I felt so bad, even though it was not our fault, that we mailed the winner another set of tickets for last year’s events. He didn’t have to enter the give-away contest again. The second time was the charm; the tickets arrived safe and sound.

I’m not trolling the post office. It has some of the same problems newspapers have - technology being one of the biggest.

I am sending fewer letters and more emails. It’s free and gets to its destination instantly. If an email is undeliverable, it comes back to me in a few seconds. I can even send a receipt to someone’s cellphone. I’m almost guaranteed that they’ll see the text message in a matter of seconds. We’re programmed in this respect like Pavlo’s dogs - when the bell goes off, we jump.

Along the same lines, printing presses cannot keep up with today’s lightning-fast social media information flow. Neither can TV or radio, but newspapers have always co-existed with those.

The big difference between the post office and newspapers is that the post office today is stuck delivering the mail the same way it always has. It’s just mail that needs to be delivered -  the same old, although important, concept.

Printed publications like magazines and newspapers can carve out a niche for themselves that can still make the products stand out. And when the post office screws up one of our correspondences, we can write a column about it.