Steve; You don't wind up "paying less" if you have to replace broken chips and mail them out a second time at additional expense. You are fortunate that it has not happened to you yet ... but trust me ... it will.

Not too long ago I sent Roy Klein a chip in trade for a current Puerto Rico chip that Roy brought back with him from his trip to PR. I carefully packed my single chip in a corrugated fold-over adhesive type SAF-T mailer and inserted the SAF-T mailer inside a plain white envelope. Needless to say, the chip arrived at Roy's end broken by the USPS machinery. Unfortunately, I didn't have an extra of the chip that I originally sent to Roy, so he accepted a second choice from my illustrated trade list I offered him.

I'll pay the extra for bubble mailers in most cases in the future.