putting a square package in a round hole-- or not...

An article on the USPS' inability to handle square envelopes and packages effectively-- from Barry Newman (an ironic reference to Seinfeld) in the Wall Street Journal and reprinted in the Tucson Citizen-- what he labels "postal shapism"...

The square has four equal sides and four right angles. It is a regular shape. To the U.S. Postal Service, however, the square is "unusual." Its sorting machines, built for oblongs, can't find the address on a square envelope. People have to do it. That's why the post office imposes the square surcharge.

The square surcharge has been around since machine sorting began in 1979, yet even those who knew about it rarely knew how many stamps to put on a square letter. Postal clerks often didn't know, either, so square letters mostly got delivered anyway.

Then last May, the post office launched a new "shape-based" initiative. Mailing a one-ounce oblong costs 41 cents. A one-ounce square costs 58 cents, including a 17-cent surcharge for squareness....

Rectangular envelopes are always knocked down by sorting machines onto one of two long, stable edges. Ink detectors find the stamps: front or back, upper right or lower left. It then takes only two steps — flip and turn — to line them up for a computer to read addresses and spray on bar codes.

But squares land on any one of four edges, not two. So for half of them, mathematically, finding addresses takes four steps. When the machines fail, humans get involved — at a cost, Mr. Mazurkiewicz explained, of $52-per-thousand envelopes instead of $4....

Among square-envelope advocates, such thoughts promise little joy to the world, best wishes or happy anniversaries. Alan Friedman, for one, is sending the post office no valentines. Mr. Friedman, who is 53 years old, owns Great Arrow Graphics, a small company housed in a former windshield-wiper factory here in Buffalo. Great Arrow makes greeting cards. Square greeting cards.

"Squares," Mr. Friedman said one rainy Tuesday, "are the most current and most exciting product in paper communications." He was on his shop floor, where young printmakers were mixing inks, inking silk-screens and stacking racks of cards for Christmas. Several cards had drawings on them of round ornaments. "Look at the interplay between the circle and the square," said Mr. Friedman, holding one up. "It's the aesthetic, the balance. Such a compelling format."

Of the seven billion greeting cards Americans buy each year, squares are a minority. At the giants, Hallmark Cards Inc. and American Greetings Corp., they occupy a remote corner of the business. But small companies that rely on them, like Mr. Friedman's, feel they're victims of postal shapism. It's bad enough when grandma's birthday card comes back stamped "postage due." It's worse when grandma herself has to pay the extra 17 cents. Afraid of deflating card-customer cheeriness, some card shops are chucking their squares into the circular file....

At the Postal Service, however, squares embody extra handling. Its official philosophy, derived from decades of debate with mass mailers, is that envelopes needing extra handling need extra postage, 58-cent stamps in the case of square letters.

At Great Arrow Graphics, these tidings weren't glad. From 60 square cards for Christmas, Mr. Friedman's silk-screeners are down to nine this year. Other greeting-worthy occasions have been fully oblongated: for instance, death. "Nobody wants sympathy cards returned," says Mr. Friedman. "We don't mess with sympathy." In his sympathy line, only pet sympathy is still square.

Some square Great Arrow designs are being printed now on oblong cards. For those remaining, the shop has devised an oblong envelope with a middle pocket that squares slip neatly into. A 41-cent stamp is all they need. Mr. Friedman's square-Christmas-card sets with their new oblong envelopes are going on sale this season packed in oblong boxes.

"We're just trying to avoid the whole debacle," he says. Yet Mr. Friedman is a man of goodwill whose thoughts about the Postal Service are as kind as those expressed in his greeting cards — with an added twinkle of bemused curiosity. Which is why he was happy to leave his shop early this day for a drive across town and a visit to the USPS Buffalo Processing and Distribution Center.

"The post office is caring," he said, walking up a ramp from the parking lot. "It embraces its neighbors. One of its quaint beauties is that you never quite know what's going to happen. If everything worked like clockwork, it wouldn't be enough fun."...

An inefficient government monopoly is caring and fun, huh? He must have a strange sense of humor and compassion!