💧 Great Name, Terrible Shipping

[Perhaps I should be a business efficiency consultant.]
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:

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! ↩︎

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. ↩︎

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. ↩︎