Most brides expect to drop plenty of cash on pre-nuptial postage, which makes sense considering that so many wedding invitations are outsized and overstuffed. I even had to pay quite a bit extra to mail my invitations as they were too small to be properly read by the USPS sorting machines. But who woulda thunk that orienting the stamps and destination on your envelope incorrectly could turn a $.41 letter into a $1.13 letter?
Alison found this out the hard way, according to Boing Boing.
I’m getting married at the end of the summer and am using a lovely red No 10 standard size envelope. The problem is that I decide to get funky. Instead of addressing the envelopes normally, I decided to orient the envelope vertically and put the stamp at the top (what would be the lower right-hand corner in a normal horizontal envelope).
Since the envelope is still the same size, I mistakenly thought that the postage would be 41 cents. Oh how I was wrong! My invitations all came back to me asking for 17 more cents. I brought them back to the post office, where the surprisingly friendly staff explained that since the simple act of spinning my envelope 90 degrees increased my postage to 58 cents.
But that’s not the end of the story…apparently, Alison was lucky that her invitations made it to their destinations. All but one, that is. When she returned to her local post office to ask what gives, she was told that postage should have been $1.13 on all of her invitations. In the end, she only had to shell out the extra $.58 for one invitation, but she could have prevented a whole mess of confusion by bringing one invitation to the PO to have it weighed and priced. That’s how I found out that I’d have to pay extra for my itty-bitty envelopes! It’s just a good way to prevent one more stressful surprise from rearing its ugly head in the days before your impending marriage.
The Day’s Aside:
Like the envelope above? It comes from Greer, a lovely paper shop based out of Chicago. In addition to their totally sweet invitations and stationary, they also offer a unique range of brilliantly-hued envelopes. Greer affixes 41 cents or more in vintage stamps to envelopes you can mail, as is. No extra postage required!
