Direct marketing: polyethylene bag, heat sealed or open at one end, used to deliver one or more mailing pieces to an address. Polybags may be transparent or colorfully printed. They are the dominant carrier for card deckS because of their low cost and attention-getting power, and usually have a tear strip at one end to open them easily.
Because of regulations passed by the USPS in 1986, secondclass mailers, such as magazines, can mail promotional material such as brochures, reply cards, and catalogs inside the same sealed polybag as the magazine and pay second-class postage on everything. These are commonly referred to as piggyback mailings, outserts, or ridealongs. One thing that cannot be mailed at second-class rates is a product sample, which must mail third-class. In early 1987, the USPS considers anything that could not conceivably be bound into the magazine a product sample; therefore, fragrance strips and paper-embedded cosmetic samples can usually qualify for secondclass treatment, while a bar of soap cannot. Stricter regulations were being considered at the time of publication that would disallow anything not relevant to the contents of the magazine.
Merchandising: polybags are also used to package retail merchandise such as groceries, hardware, and garments.
