The Postal Service has a ton of rules, some of them painfully complicated yet necessary, some of them just a pain. A story in a Wisconsin newspaper, linked to on the Postcom web site illustrates one of the latter.

A man successfully unloaded a pile of old farming magazines from the 1940’s on eBay, estimating media mail shipping costs at $8.00. When he got to the post office, however, he was surprised to discover that because the magazines contained advertising, they couldn’t be shipped media mail, and it was going to cost closer to $20 to mail them.

The advertising rule makes sense when applied to current periodicals, but it’s hard to see why it should apply to what are obviously not active advertisements.

A mindless adherence to the letter of the regulation when it so clearly violates the intent isn’t particularly smart. I realize that it’s not in the postal service’s financial interest to encourage the use of low revenue services like media mail. But as long as they’re in the rate structure, they should be made available openly and reasonably.

Collector trying to change letter of the law regarding advertising postal regulation: Provision interferes with man’s plans to sell artifacts on eBay

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 6:48 am and is filed under media mail, postal, retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.