Mail Opening and Mail Auditing Departments
If there is anyone department in this establishment more interesting than another to the vast majority of our visitors, it is that department which receives Qur daily mail. As practically every order comes to us by mail, and our business has now grown to such an enormous volume, the mail received by us each day is of unusual proportions and it requires one hundred and twenty people to open and read the first class mail which comes to us each workirig day in the year. It is no uncommon experience for us to receive ninety thousand letters and postals in a single day.
The government sends our mail by special wagon four times daily, and as rapidly as the mail sacks are received in the Mail Opening Department the letters and postals are passed through a machine which stamps the date and hour of arrival in the house on each and every piece, this work being performed automatically at the rate of eight hundred per minuta. The postals are then separated from the letters and the edges of the envelopes opened by machinery. An expert operator on the mail opening machine will handle from ten thousand to twelve thousand letters per hour. The opened letters are passed to careful clerks who remove the contents from the envelopes and separate those letters containing orders from those relative to miscellaneous matters.
In the Mail Auditing Department the orders sent us by our customers are read carefully to see that they are regular in every respect; that the catalogue numbers, sizes, and all other necessary information has been given by the customer, so that we may intelligently handle his order.
After the orders, have been carefully scrutinized they are delivered to what we call the Cash Crediting Division. Here the cash creditors verify all moneys and papers received and ascertain whether remittances are in regular form. Sometimes money orders are incomplete, a check may be unsigned and any number of defects are discovered every day in remittances received from customers, which make it impossible for us to collect funds sent us by them, and the principal labor of the Cash Crediting Division is to see that all remittances are good before the order is accepted. The amount of money included with an order is then indicated on the face of the original order and a record made. The orders are then passed to another division where a second record of the order is written, this being our permanent record of the transaction, which indicates the invoice number, the state in which the customer lives and the amount of money received. After this handling in the Mail Auditing Department, the orders are sent to the Entry Department. It may be of interest for us to tell you that we have received in a single day’s mail, customers’ orders accompanied by post office money orders, express money orders, checks, drafts and currency to a total of three hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars.
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