Back in the days before email, ecommerce, online bill pay, people had to mail a lot more things and having to write you address on everything you mailed out gets tiring after a while. He wasn’t doing it to be virtuosos, he was doing it for the free labels.
My brother used to send a dollar to the ones that would send you return address labels. That way he would end up getting plenty of free return address labels he could use on his own mail.
Thankfully, the band program where I went to school never had to resort to that. Instead, the band boosters owned EVERY piece of concession equipment throughout the entire school district. So if the concession stand was open for any event, the band was making money.
One of the reasons that paper coupons started going away is that there were people that would clean out entire newspaper vending machines (i.e. pay for one, steal the rest) just to resell the coupon sections from the Sunday papers.It started with the companies moving up the expiration dates to give people less time to use them in the hopes that coupon sellers wouldn’t have trouble getting them to buyers quick enough for them to be able to use them. Removing them altogether was just the next step.
The better trick is Siegfried and Roy being alive.