Heavy Cancels and Wrecked Stamps

It's always discouraging when you order some stamps from a seller and they take the time to use nice stamps as postage, only to have those stamps wrecked by the postal service.  If you buy stamp mixtures by the pound, the percent of stamps that are in fine, collectible condition is much lower than I recall from even 10 years ago.

Here are some from Germany and Malta that got wrecked...


The two biggest culprits are heavy, smudgy machine cancels and hand-scribbled pen markings.  The worst of the latter are when the postal worker uses a thick marker and ruins a whole line of stamps in under a second.

I realize that the postal services need to protect their revenue stream, but if they also want to sell millions of $ of stamps to collectors each year, maybe they should at least act like what they're selling has value.

Here's a case of a seller putting a lot of care into making a nice package, but someone at the post office just decided to turn it into crap.  Thanks a lot.


 

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