Postage stamps - franked or not

Has Canada Post given up on franking postage stamps? I return them almost in bulk to my pen friends in Ontario as "souvenirs." Someone watches over the stream of mail from the UK to the US, swiping his ballpoint pen over the many high-priced stamps that regularly escape Britain's franking equipment. US franking machines haven't learned where stamps might be if away from the top edge of the envelope. A 1¢ in the upper right corner will be franked, leaving unscathed the $1.20 stamp well below that, but anything near the bottom edge can be barcoded. Germany's franks always hit their marks, as do those of the Netherlands.

It's a bit like a lottery. In some areas of the UK stamps are neither franked nor scribbled on in ballpoint by postal delivery workers.
There used to be a hobby called philately, but while franked or unfranked stamps are still collectable, scribbled on stamps are not. I'm not even sure charities can collect and earn funds from scribbled stamps.

Franking machines can get caught out with wax seals so that might be one reason for stamps sometimes not being franked, but perhaps, in busy times, batches go through Canada without being sent to the franking machines?

And you can be wrong about that 1c stamp at the top of the letter. Sometimes they aren't franked either. :)

Fred

Frank retired a while back. Reuse them until they get it right.

Frank's son got hired. He just sent a postcard back to me - not "Return To Sender", he actually mailed it to the miniscule printed return address instead of sending it to the Very Large, Legible, Hand-Printed "To:" Address...

...which happened to be just below the notation, in red stamped ink "Please Deliver To:"

Those fricking Franks.

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Germany's franks always hit their marks...

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That is just hilarious, and I hope deliberate (which I should be confident of as Fred is a smart guy).

Today, more pristine Canada Post stamps. I can't remember a Canadian postage stamp franked by Canada Post. They are only cancelled if a USPS bar code happens to run across them. Maybe Frank is still quarantined, or dead.

I have never had a single franked letter from Canada, though on one occasion when I got a letter covered in low value vintage stamps someone had run a pen through them.

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Originally Posted by checkrail

I have never had a single franked letter from Canada, though on one occasion when I got a letter covered in low value vintage stamps someone had run a pen through them.

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I take my personal letters to the post office instead of putting them in a mail box and that way they get hand stamped, which looks nice and old fashioned.

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Originally Posted by checkrail

...I got a letter covered in low value vintage stamps someone had run a pen through them.

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I received the same last week from Ontario.

This one that arrived today would have been franked...had the sender remembered to apply a postage stamp. ;-)

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Originally Posted by Ole Juul

I take my personal letters to the post office instead of putting them in a mail box and that way they get hand stamped, which looks nice and old fashioned.

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Down here in Baja Canada, I used to do the same thing until a couple of years ago, when my local post office (and I think all US post offices) starting charging extra for hand-stamping!

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Originally Posted by FredRydr

This one that arrived today would have been franked...had the sender remembered to apply a postage stamp. ;-)

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I guess a problem with postcards is that senders don't usually add their address so the only possible place to deliver it to is the recipient. At least you don't get charged a high handling fee on top of the original amount like Royal Mail do here in the UK. I'm not sure what your regular stamp price would have been but that looks reasonably close. :)