Color of the Envelope Seals the Fate of Holiday Mail

Thousands of Ventura County residents who thought they were spreading Christmas cheer may be the grinches behind holiday mail delays, post office officials said Wednesday.

Well-wishers who sent their holiday cards in red or green envelopes have inadvertently caused postal traffic jams because the “electronic eye” on the machines that process the mail has difficulty reading the print on dark envelopes.

While white or light-colored envelopes are easily readable by machine, darker envelopes have to be hand-processed, said Kandy Giblin, a postal official at the regional office in Santa Clarita, where mail from Thousand Oaks and other areas of Ventura County are handled.

It is a costly and time-consuming alternative, she said.

Aside from stalling the delivery of colored mail for up to a day, the process of sorting the dark-hued pieces slows the flow of regular mail and packages. “It’s a domino effect,” Giblin said.

The U.S. Postal Service’s computerized, high-speed processing equipment reads about 35,000 pieces of mail each hour. Unreadable envelopes are sent to slower, more sensitive machines. When those fail, the mail is sent to postal workers for old-fashioned sorting by hand.

When the postal service introduced the high-tech scanning machines in 1993, they knew of the color-sensing problems that would ensue.

A group of postal executives in Washington set up a special task force to discourage card manufacturers from peddling problematic colors. They warned major card-producers that the new scanners could not read addresses written on dark-colored envelopes, even if addresses were written in darker ink.

Many companies complied immediately, changing their holiday colors to white, cream and light green. Artists at Hallmark Inc. in Kansas City, Mo., began experimenting with metallic borders and festive designs printed on light-colored backgrounds.

“It has forced us to be a little more creative with our envelopes,” Hallmark spokeswoman Michelle Keller said. “If anything, it has expanded our options.”

Oxnard’s postal-distribution facility, which handles most of Ventura County’s mail, has received more than 8 million pieces since the official postal holiday season began Nov. 29. Only about 325,000 of the pieces came in unreadable envelopes.

That’s a vast improvement over previous years, officials said.

“We’ve had great cooperation from the greeting-card industry,” operations support manager Larry Engler said.

But local greeting-card merchants said loyal customers have been disappointed by the lack of color in their holiday options.

“Almost everything is white this year,” said Newbury Park resident Claudia White, who works at Robbie’s Hallmark in Thousand Oaks.

“People are complaining. They want their red and green envelopes at Christmas time,” she said.

Customers have requested older editions of cards, hoping to find their beloved Christmas colors among the archival envelopes, she said.

But Giblin and her postal colleagues hope the return to white envelopes continues. It would help them get the holiday mail out on time, she said.

In the meantime, she advised those awaiting late mail to “just be patient. This is obviously a heavy season for us, and we’re doing everything we can.”

The post office’s Express Mail service delivers letters and packages 365 day a year, but regular mail service is not available Christmas Day and will resume Friday.