Paul's Comments

When you've been a Notary Public, as I have (still am; I don't use it much but I still have commissions from Maryland and Virginia), you handle a lot of paperwork. I used to do mobile notary back when I could walk, during the height of the mortgage refinancing craze. You have a package of documents, typically about 75 to 125 pages depending on the mortgage company.

There are two ways they can handle paperwork. They can generate a PDF file, and e-mail it to the notary or have the notary retrieve it from a website, or they can print the document themselves and ship it to the notary. I've done it both ways. The obviously least expensive way to do this is to pay the notary to print it out because they save as much as $30 figuring they don't have to pay the cost of printing and shipping it.

Which brings me to the subject of shipping documents. The Postal Service talks about their "low flat rate" charge for document shipping, at $4.95 for Priority Mail. Yeah, if you can wait 2 days, that is probably the simplest answer. But most mortgage documents get generated within a day or less of when they're needed; more than once I had one where they were generating the documents right up to a couple hours before I had to leave to go to the signing. When you're doing documents electronically that makes sense.

For ordinary documents Priority Mail makes basically no sense at all. Let's say I've got a 30 page document. You can get about 6 pages per ounce, so that is about 5 ounces. The longest possible shipment, let's say Miami to Anchorage, Priority mail is the "low, low rate" of about $4.95. First class mail - the exact same thing - is $1.56. Oh yeah, Priority mail is a really low price.

It's when you get to heavier documents where it gets interesting. Let's say you have 200 page document, which would weigh about 34 ounces. If it's a manuscript like a book , you can send it Media Mail. Otherwise (business you can either send it priority mail, or put it in a box and ship it as a package as parcel post if you're really cheap, and don't mind waiting up to a week.

Priority Mail in an envelope is $13.20 but if you can fit it in a flat-rate envelope then it's still $4.95. So that document is going to cost $9 to ship plus at least $10 to print, or $18. On the other hand, if you can e-mail the whole document as a PDF, then the recipient, say, only has to return two pages: the signature page signed twice (so the recipient can return the document countersigned), the cost drops to 98c (two pages printed at 5c plus 44c to mail two pages to the sender and 44c to mail the one countersigned page back.) Or maybe not even mail anything back by sending a presigned document and the recipient signing it and mailing that one page.

E-mail, PDFs and faxes are killing the Post Office. UPS and Fedex handle a lot of packages, and it's only because bills still go by mail that the post office is doing that. Which brings up yet another article.