I found something very strange when checking the mail the other day. The flyer you see above was in my mail box - burnt!
Did a mail truck catch on fire? Why would a postal worker deliver a half-burnt piece of mail? In all my years, I have never received something in the mail that apparently went through a fire. Keith and I were kinda shocked but then when Josh took a look at it, we began to question it more…
Something about this seems fishy. It almost seems like the burns are too perfect. Looking at the whole flyer again, only a small segment of text from the center is “burnt” away - all of the other text and necessary information is still intact. And that small section that is missing only contains the first letter of the street name and the first word of the city, both of which are common knowledge if you live around here.
We also noticed that the pre sorted postage paid area was not damaged and the only address, both to and from, was ECRWSS Local Postal Customer. ECRWSS stands for Extended Carrier Route Walking Sequence Saturation, which is a type of saturation mail where someone mails out to every customer in a specific area or ZIP code instead of to each named individual.
We came to one of two conclusions. Either this piece of mail was actually burnt and still placed in my box, or this is a clever marketing scheme. After all, it’s sure to garner attention (see, I am blogging about it!) and as we saw here, no vital piece of information was missing from the “damaged” flyer.
I am personally leaning towards marketing. What do you think? Have you ever received anything like this before?
