Last February, I received an unexpected and unexplained envelope in the mail:

It was addressed to me at my company, and I’ll be honest, I don’t get a lot of work mail. I also don’t get a lot of mail with the words “Kids Fun Fair Barnyard Petting Zoo” on it. In a word, I was intrigued.

When I opened it up, I found no letter of explanation. The only thing the envelope contained was a stack of exactly 30 slips of paper, each of which proclaimed “Free Ticket (Value $8)”. Their design was something of unholy mess:

This is quite overwhelming, but I made note of a wide variety of things.

• Though the top says “Free Ticket”, it requires the purchase of a paid adult entry. That makes this more of a coupon, as it is not enough for entry on its own.

• It’s not clear just how much a standard adult ticket costs, but the first 100 adults (each day?) pay just $9.99. That means if you get there early enough, you and two kids can get full access to this fun fair for just ten bucks. You should probably line up the night before.

• “Come Hungry!” is an absolutely amazing instruction. They are surely not providing free food, so you should also make sure your wallet comes full, and be prepared for it to leave empty.

• Despite the envelope’s Connecticut return address, the event lists “Wilmington” and the Aleppo Shriner’s Aud. That’s actually in Massachusetts, about half an hour north of Boston.

• The event is listed as “Feb 15 & 16 & 17”, but “Rain or Shine Two Days Only”. Whoops. Also, in February in Massachusetts, snow is much more likely than rain.

• On the first day, the fair runs from 10 AM to 7 PM. The second and third days, it goes from 10 AM to 6 PM. Whenever I see hours like this, I can’t help but feel it would be preferable to just have symmetry in the hours for all the days. At the very least, it’d save some ink.

• Finally, there’s a domain listed, kidsfunfair.com. That site could charitably be called “serviceable”.

I ultimately chucked the whole thing in the recycling bin and moved on with my life. That is until I received an identical envelope this year. Inside it, I once again found exactly 30 slips of paper, provided without explanation:

Hey, they fixed that “two days only” error. Good for them.

As these envelopes have included the name of my business, I imagine the hope is that I’ll distribute them to my customers. If so, it would be good to include a letter with an explicit request. It would also be good to know that my company is entirely virtual, with no customers coming to my home office. Oh, and it’s an audio software company that has no relation whatsoever to children, that’s worthwhile information too.

Still, maybe this bizarre marketing is working, because I’m almost tempted to go myself.¹ Even if I do, though, my lack of children means I can’t take advantage of this offer. Perhaps you’d like to? If you want free entry for your two children to this weekend’s Kids Fun Fair Barnyard Petting Zoo, just let me know.³ Inexplicably, I’ve got 30 vouchers to get you just that.

Footnotes:

1. It’s unlikely I actually will attend, but at least I found a 20+ minute video offering a great view of last year’s event.² Check out that surely unlicensed SpongeBob SquarePants fun house! ↩︎

2. I’ve archived a very tiny (240p) version of this video here. ↩︎

3. The paper says “children up to 13”, the website says “children 12 and under”, and I say if you’ve got a 13-year-old interested to do this, you should just lie and claim they’re 12. ↩︎

A few years back, I discovered miniature greeting cards. At just 3.25 inches small, their diminutive size tickles me. Just look at that:

It’s so wee!

I recently needed to convey some birthday well-wishes, but the in-store selection for these mini-cards tends to be poor, so I headed to Hallmark.com.¹ There, I ordered 9 miniature cards at $2 a pop, with $2.99 shipping. I placed an order one evening, and the cards hit the mail the very next day.

However, when my order arrived, I was more than a little confused. In fact, I remain so even now. You see, after a few days, I received two identical cardboard mailers:

One order, two envelopes

When I opened the first envelope, I found just three of my nine cards inside:

One envelope, three cards

There was no packing slip, nor anything else, save some gold stickers for use in sealing the cards’ envelopes.

🎶 Three. Gold(en). Stickers! 🎶 ²

“Odd,” thought I. “I suppose the second envelope contains my other six cards. Perhaps they didn’t think all nine would fit.”

But when I opened the second envelope, it was a duplicate of the first: three cards, three stickers, zero packing slips. I now had six of the nine cards I had purchased, and no information as to what was happening.

Befuddled, I set the whole thing aside to leave as a problem for later. The next day, I received a third envelope, identical to the first two. It contained, yes, three more cards, three more stickers, and zero more packing slips.

One order, three shipping envelopes

I’m at a loss to explain all this. These three items were surely placed in the mail together, and yet one of them lagged behind the other two. I suppose that can be explained as simply the vagaries of the post office, and I should just be grateful that I received all three envelopes.

More importantly, I can’t fathom how any system could’ve opted to send this in three envelopes, each costing $0.87 to mail. There is no question that all nine could easily fit in one envelope:

It was not a tight fit.

I’ve gone so far as to weigh each of the components here, from the mailers (a hefty 26 grams, nearly 1 ounce) to each card, envelope, and sticker trio (4.67g). That means 9 cards in 1 mailer would total about 2.4 ounces. The postage on each envelope does indicate this cost is for a 2 ounce letter, but surely 3 ounces would not cost substantially much more. The USPS calculator lists a 2 ounce letter at $0.90 and a 3 ounce letter at $1.14.³

It seems impossible that mailing multiple heavy mailers containing feather-light cards could be economically efficient. Even if there were some magic to the 2 ounce threshold, the math shows they could’ve sent this in two envelopes, containing 5 cards and 4 cards. What am I missing?

Clearly, I’ve fallen down a real rabbit hole on this. It’s time to climb out, and accept a simpler explanation: a broken shipping algorithm. If that’s the case, some buggy code could be costing the company millions of dollars in wasted shipping costs each year, while also needlessly enlarging their carbon footprint.

Should anyone at Hallmark see this, please, use these findings. Dig in, then maybe save the company millions and get yourself a career advancement. All I ask is that you get in touch to explain what the heck is going on.

Previously in shipping madness: Perception Is Reality

Footnotes:

1. In the course of writing this post, I also stumbled on some excellent trivia related to the company’s name. The English word “hallmark”, meaning “a mark attesting to purity or quality”, has been around since the 1700s. Hallmark Cards, Inc., meanwhile, opened its doors in 1910. But the company didn’t simply choose a random positive noun to trademark.

   No, Hallmark is a family-owned business founded by Joyce Hall and still run by the Hall family, and that makes “Hallmark” an amazing name for their company. Nice work, Joyce! ↩︎

2. If you don’t shout-sing this to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, I’m sorry for the loss of your inner child. ↩︎

3. I believe the price difference here of $0.90 vs. $0.87 can be explained by Hallmark using Endicia, which I assume provides a small discount. ↩︎

Recently, I received a letter from CVS. Mail! What fun! Here’s a look:

You know what, My Local CVS Team? You’re absolutely right. Let’s celebrate me! Why not? I’m worth it. After all, I’m extra-special. I’m sure you don’t give out <reads letter further> two 30% off coupons to just anyone.

Of course, I appreciate paying a mere 70% of overpriced downtown retail prices as much as the next city dweller. But let’s not pretend this is something more than that, CVS Boston.

For reasons beyond my understanding, I receive catalogs in the mail. Though I actively work to get off mailing lists, this seems to only slow the stream, never stop it. Recently, I received a catalog from “Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams”. After a quick Google search, I determined that that’s both a furniture company and the names of the two men who co-founded the company.

According to the company’s website, Mitchell and Bob have a shared vision, “to make the world a more comfortable place: for all”. The cover of the catalog I received seems to indicate they may also have a shared mouth:

This is, supposedly, a quote, and it’s attributed to both men. It’s got quotation marks and everything. Are we supposed to believe they said this in unison? Did they have a script in front of them, and maybe do a little count-down so they’d be in sync? The whole thing seems ridiculous.

In completely related news, Catalog Choice is a quick and handy way to reduce the amount of junk catalogs you receive, and save a few trees as well.

The US Postal Service has long been known to have utterly terrible tracking for deliveries:

In 2019, however, there’s a superior way to track packages. Google recently began providing a card showing package status when you search for a tracking number:

The results are quite good. Here’s a screenshot taken this past weekend, of a package in transit:

And here’s that same package today, after the item was delivered on Tuesday:

That’s helpful, and certainly what I hoped to find.

What I can’t understand, however, is how Google is beating USPS at their own tracking game using data USPS is giving them. It says right there, “Data provided by USPS”. And yet, here’s the same tracking number, run through USPS’s tracking page today 24 hours after the package was delivered:

Perhaps USPS provided Google with the only copy of the data.

I’ve written about this before:

But if you’re not taking fake titles for yourself whenever possible:

You’re missing out on the ways in which junk mail can bring you joy.