I stopped at my local post office and figured while I was there, I'd ask about hand cancelling for my STDs/invites. I wanted to know the policy and make sure they don't charge extra for it. This is the response I got verbatim:
"Ohh honey, that's old school. We don't do that anymore. Even if you were to hand cancel them, the minute you hand them to me, they go in the same bin as everything else. We have no way to separate them. They go through the machine regardless."
What? Okay, hand cancelling is unnecessary and mostly just looks better. But I'm doing single envelope invites and postcard STDs and I'm worried about them being damaged. Advice?