I'll Call Him Stampy
By Jocelyn Geboy in News on Feb 27, 2007 7:10PM
We're torn. On the one hand, every time we hear that the Post Office is about to raise its rates again, we think, "Are you kidding me? You just raised rates, what? Two years ago? C'mon!" Cause we hate it when anything goes up in price, and it seems like when we were kids, the raising of the price of a stamp happened every ten years, and it seemed like such a monumental milestone. Of course, we were kids, so time had a way of being much longer than it is now, so it probably really wasn't every ten years. But still.
On the other hand, even if the price of a stamp were, $.75 or a $1.00 (we're only kidding, USPS), it still would be amazing that a piece of mail could get across the country in two or three days. You know? Cause, that's still pretty sweet. For under $.50, you can send a letter to California from here, and in a fairly short amount of time, there it is. Yes, we have been the victim of a system gone wrong. It's sort of like the CTA. We love it, we hate it, but when we boil it down, it's a pretty amazing deal when you consider what we spend for what we get most of the time.
We realize that there are people who still use stamps to mail their bill payments. So, that might start to be a little bit of money. But we know that there are a large majority of people who either pay their bills online or who definitely have the option to. And so we use the United States Post Office (USPS) primarily for handwritten letters, cards and fun stuff.
Editorializing aside, the USPS is planning on raising stamp prices again. But they're coming out with a stamp that might change everything. Especially if you're one of these people who stocks up on things.
The Postal Regulatory Commission has signed off on a proposal to raise the price of a first-class stamp from 39 cents to 41 cents. But, they've also signed off on the "forever stamp," a stamp that will always be worth the price of a first-class stamp. Initially, they will be sold at the $.41 price, but then they will be forever good as a first-class stamp, eliminating the need to buy all those one- and two-cent stamps to make up for the difference in postage when rates are raised again.
We loved this quote from commission spokesman Stephen Sharfman: "The new stamps' shelf life would make good sense for the post office. It's costly for the Postal Service to have make-up stamps. It has to print them and sell them, and that eats into the time postal employees could be using for other tasks." Oh. The make-up stamps are what's causing the delay every freakin' time we go to the Post Office? It's not only having two people at the counter at noon, or them working super slow, or sometimes being surly? It's the two-cent stamps? We had no clue. Thank goodness they are coming out with the forever stamp. We bet things are just going to fly over at the post office now.
The only thing we wonder about is this: The article says that the "forever stamp" is going to bring in $77.6 billion in revenue in fiscal 2008. But what about all those thrifty mofos who just buy an inordinate number so that they never, ever have to worry about a rate change again? You know there are people out there like that. Those people will in effect, have discounted stamps at some point? If someone really had a lot of money, they could buy a shitload of them and sell them later on....
"Friday is Letter Day!" via Emerald2810.