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Publisher's Clearing House says that you don't have to order any magazines to enter and win the sweepstakes. If that is indeed the case, why is it that they have those holes in the envelope they provide for you to mail in your entry? Or maybe that's American Family, I can never keep them straight.

The holes, which are placed right where the spaces provided for you to stick the stamps indicating the magazines that you wish to order would be when the entry form card is inserted in the envelope. Without opening the envelope, it is plainly visible whether or not the entry card has any stamps on it. There's only one possible reason for the holes -- to handle them differently whether or not there are stamps on the order form.

I can just see some guy in the mail room opening mail bags taking out the entries one at a time putting those with visible stamps in another bag to be forwarded to billing where they make sure that you get a bill. Billing then forwards them to circulation where they add you to the mailing list. If your entry card didn't get lost by this time, it is then forwarded to the sweepstakes department and you actually get in the huge drum where it can not possibly get picked, because it is on the bottom.

If no stamps are visible in the little holes in the envelope, the guy in the mail room throws them in the dumpster next to him. When the dumpster gets full it is taken to the basement and he shovels them into the incinerator. Let's hope that they at least recycle them in the form of heat for the building.

I see no other reason for those little holes in the envelopes. Somebody told me that they do it in order to send those without stamps directly to the sweepstakes department without having to forward them to billing and then to circulation, but I don't believe that; it makes no sense to me. Wouldn't all of the envelopes need opening at some point or other? There's got to be a reason they went to all that trouble of punching those holes in just the right places.

Why not just put the sweepstakes entry and the magazine order form on separate cards? Or two halves of the same card with perforations? Because it is cheaper to punch holes in the envelope than to waste all of that manpower opening envelopes which will be incinerated along with their contents anyway.

Otherwise, it would be easier to send all of the envelopes to the sweepstakes department; they can open them and forward the magazine order form to the billing department if there are stamps on it.

Of course this leaves the guy in the mail room without much to do, and the dumpster would have to be moved to the sweepstakes department for all of those order forms without stamps. And I suppose that they would need a bigger drum too if they included all of those entries from cheapskates who don't buy any magazines.

No, actually I am pretty sure that they do it so that when my wife sees these holes, she thinks that there is no point in entering without ordering magazines. I asked her if she entered the sweepstakes, she said "I didn't want any magazines so I saved them the trouble and threw it away myself."