Stovebolt.com Forums The Back Office The Greasy Spoon Shipping cost

I can see a regular envelope being an issue but a padded envelope would have been more cost effective.

Agreed. It depends on the part and the envelope. I had a cell phone holster that kept getting crushed and broken when shipped in a padded envelope. I asked the seller to put it in a box. What he did was stick it in a paper envelope that made it too bulky for the automatic bulk sorting machine so it had to be hand sorted. It took longer but it arrived undamaged.

I thought they fixed them machines from breaking open letters, My brother was a machanic in the big post office Portland Oregon and he told me that one time over a hundred union pin buttons were found at the collection box of them machines from being blown out of the envelopes ,,that was 50 years ago ,, guess not..

The PO charges more if your package is over 1/4" thick or uneven thickness, which probably means they don't run it thru the machines. I've gotten keys in a standard envelope when they were taped to a piece of paperboard (like a cereal box). I've also gotten a few standard envelopes that were mangled pretty badly by the sorting machine.

I recently sent a pizza box to Alaska, it got there intact in a week. (This is stovebolt related, it had an engine fan in it.)

Leo, you’re in the Greasy Spoon so it really doesn’t matter!

But there was no Pizza in it.

Sometimes it is not the sorters. I receive a lot of Amazon packages because I order for friends that don't have computers. Some come in packages that are padded and the mail person jams them in the mailbox and I have had difficulty getting them out. BTW I live on a rural route.

We have neighborhood boxes and the back door opens up by the mail carrier and the individual boxes are bigger than the door for us on the other side. Once they stuffed a box in that was big enough to fit in the back, but not come out the front. I had to cut the box open and pull the contents out then collapse the box to get to the rest of my mail. Grrrr!

They have talked about the boxes in our neighborhood. But nothing came of it YET. The local newspaper prints everything but local news just to have enough news to print. It is the Chronicle-Tribune, I call it the comical tribune. The population in the city has gone down since 1961 when I moved here. The city and the county had equally about 42000 now 28000. Over the years we have lost maybe ten major manufacturing plants. The area was known for its glass works and automotive plants and parts plants. All are gone except a GM plant and they just announced a big investment in equipment but no new jobs. And of course, they get a big incentive tax breaks.