USPS spokesman comments on upright Jenny Invert pane distribution

United States Postal Service spokesman Mark Saunders responded to Linn's Stamp News editor Charles Snee's editorial "Searching for an upright Jenny Invert pane? Try high-volume post offices for better luck." Saunders said:

The Postal Service went to great lengths to ensure a fair and widespread distribution of the uninverted Jenny sheets. The goal was to provide every customer the same probability of finding an uninverted Jenny stamp sheet — about 1 in 20,000 — and also to ensure the sheets were distributed as widely as possible, both geographically and in terms of office size — from the largest Post Offices to small Post Offices in rural America.

Sheets were distributed to offices with probability corresponding to the number of regular sheets they would normally receive. However, a purely random distribution applied nationwide might have ended up with multiple uninverted jenny sheets in one city with none in other cities, and might have ended up with none in small offices.

To be as equitable as possible, Post Offices were grouped together to ensure that each group got at least one. For example, all the offices in a large city were grouped together so that one sheet would end up somewhere in that metropolitan area. Similarly for distribution among all small Post Offices.