What happens to postage-paid magazine insert cards that fall out of magazines in transit?
Magazines are often full of small insert cards, usually 3×5 or 4×6 inches, that are postage-paid reply cards. These can be for subscriptions, reader information, or third-party ads. Some are glued or stapled in, but many are just loose. They stay in place only by pressure and static electricity. If you give a magazine a good shake (sometimes you must rifle through the pages), they fall out.
The post office delivers millions of magazines every day. Some of these insert cards must fall out. What does the post office do with them? Do they deliver them, and charge the magazine (who has pre-paid the postage)? Or can they somehow screen out the blank ones, and discard them?
I work for a printing and binding company. My parents are employee’s for the united states postal service. This is how it works. There are several kind of cards in a magazine. If your magazine has glued backbone, then you will have glued in cards. if your magazine has a saddlestitch, then it will have little metal "staples" holding it together (including all cards inside). There are also "Blow-in" cards. these are the cards that are shot loose-leaf into magazines. the design is so that when you open the magazine, the card falls out so that you pick it up and look at it. cheap easy and effective. The thing is, when the customer purchases these cards, they are informed that it is not a guaranteed card. there is a possibility that the customer will never see it. If the post office is delivering a magazine in which the card has fallen out, chances are the card fell out before the postman even touched it. The thing is, no postal employee is going to interfere with the mail. thats a federal offense. If a card falls out of a specific magazine, they will most likely pick it up and put it back in. Could they mail it in? yes they could. The company with prepaid postage probably recieves blank responses all the time, but the cost to them is negligible and doesnt matter. its not the responsibilty of the post office to screen out business reply mail, so they dont. if you put a blank card in the box, they will mail it.