On November 24, the Postal Service published Postmarks and Postal Possession, its final rule about postmarks and their meaning. While the document seeks to clarify that postmarks don’t mean what many Americans might think, it’s fifty years too late in doing so. Moreover, given its association with the Regional Transportation Initiative, it contaminates a simple statement with other more subjective issues like “efficiency” and USPS financial sustainability.
Back when
Generally, until the 1970s, post offices had a cancelling machine, a simple apparatus that used a mechanized feeder and a changeable dye to apply a postmark on mail bearing a “live” stamp. Though the basic purpose of the machine was to “kill” the stamp to prevent reuse, the application of a date (and “AM” or “PM” in some instances) served to demonstrate that the mailpiece was in the mail at that time.
The introduction of area mail processing – built around the aggregation of mail from post offices for mechanized (and, later, automated) processing at a centralized facility (the original sectional center facility) – meant that post offices would not be doing their own cancellation/postmarking. Rather, that combined function would occur at the “SCF.”
As time passed, processing equipment was upgraded and facilities were further consolidated, but the cancellation/postmarking function continued.
What wasn’t explained
Unfortunately, as the Postal Service many years later realized, this evolution in processing, and the related change in what the postmark represented, was never publicized. Whether because no-one in the USPS thought it needed publicity or because it (i.e., postal operations) weren’t anything about which the public had any need (or interest) to know is lost to history but, nonetheless, the public perception of the postmark remained – obsolete and increasingly inaccurate.
Worse, various government entities cited the postmark in a wide range of documents to define when a mailpiece was mailed even though they were unaware that that was no longer true –the USPS never told them otherwise, either.
(Of course, the ZIP Code – which the Postal Service implemented in the 1960s as a tool to facilitate mail distribution – was similarly usurped by a wide range of public and private entities for their own purposes. Ironically those entities later demanded changes to ZIP Codes for their own reasons having nothing to do with the USPS or the original purpose for which ZIP Codes were developed.)
RTO
The advent of the RTO program – one of the most egregiously perverse examples of “efficiency” supplanting a fundamental element of postal service – caused someone in USPS HQ to realize the significant time gap between when a customer would think a mailpiece is in the mail and when that mailpiece might later be postmarked. Mail from an RTO-impacted area can sit in a collection box or at a post office for days until it is finally transported to a postal processing facility for cancellation and postmarking.
Aside from how the time gap for non-RTO post offices has changed over the decades as area mail processing expanded and evolved, the deliberate delay of mail from RTO-impacted post offices somehow triggered the need for the Postal Service to codify what the postmark means (or doesn’t mean).
(Of course, the USPS also invented “Day 0” and other service measurement manipulations to ensure RTO doesn’t hurt service scores, but that’s another story.)
The USPS apparently realized it could no longer let the public (and government entities) quietly continue in their outdated assumptions about the postmark, and so initiated the needlessly convoluted and legalistic rulemaking that just ended.
Rather than what should have been stated publicly in the 1970s – that the purpose was to cancel the stamp and that the “postmark” means nothing more than when that happened – the USPS instead launched into a lengthy discussion of cancellation and postmarking and the many permutations of it that can occur – and a gratuitously needless invocation of the “efficiency” allegedly derived from RTO and its role in USPS “self-sufficiency.”
Ultimately, the final rule said little more than what should have been said five decades ago, only this time it included a lot more legal puffery. Perhaps the USPS should make matters even simpler: just cancel the stamp and stop adding a date that requires its significance to be explained by notice-and-comment rulemaking.