Distribution of U.S. Civil War 1864 pane limited

Some United States post offices are not receiving automatic shipments of the Civil War 1864 commemorative forever stamps.

According to the June 26 Postal Bulletin, an internal publication of the U.S. Postal Service, the stamps, issued July 30, were sent only to “premier post offices.”

“The success of our stamps business relies on effective management of production and inventories and optimizing distribution,” said Postal Service spokesman Mark Saunders. “Based on print quantities, feedback from our Postal Retail Units and past sales for Civil War, an automatic distribution was shipped to premier post offices, which was published in the USPS Civil War Postal Bulletin article.”

Post offices that didn’t receive automatic distribution of the issue are able to order it through normal USPS internal ordering processes.

Linn’s asked the Postal Service if other upcoming issues would have similar distribution limits, but received no reply.

The designation “premier post office” applies to 3,100 offices.

When the designation was created in 2013, the Postal Service stated that these post offices account for 44 percent of all “post office walk-in and self-service kiosk revenue” and that “the Premier Post Offices program is focusing resources on the few offices that generate a significant amount of Post Office revenue.”

The initial distribution of the Harry Potter forever stamp set in 2013 was to premier post offices only, but that restriction was driven by the fact that the full production run was not prepared in time to have enough sets available for distribution to all post offices.

A list of designated premier post offices was made available in conjunction with the Harry Potter stamp release. That list, in the form of a Microsoft Excel document, is available at http://about.usps.com/news/stamp-releases/harry-potter/premierofficelist.xls.