Postage going up...again

I use maybe half a dozen stamps a YEAR now. Personal communication is done either by email or phone - after all, it's not like we hve to worry about huge bills for long distance in the age of the nationl calling plan cell phone, all inclusive house phone plans, and voice over Internet. I've been paying bills over the Internet for years. There is only one bill I write an actual check for, and even that I don't mail but rather pay in person. The only thing I mail are packages, and even those I don't send very often. So I went to the post office web site to see what the increase on package shipping rates would be. it says they won't annouce the shipping rate increases until March. But I did notice something else while I was there. A couple of services have price decreases! "Lower additional ounce price for presorted First Class Mail letters" and "lower pound price for Standard Mail saturation and high-density flats." In otherwords, they are lowering the cost of sending JUNK MAIL!

I guess they are trying to compensate since a lot of people are not using mail anymore preferring to use email and IM. But it surely is not by raising the postage that they will get more people using it. They would make more sense if they created ways to incentive people to use regular mail more often - maybe emphasizing the more personal facet of handwriting a letter as opposed to the impersonality of emailing. Or make it fun to send post cards again or something like that. As for paying bills online I think that if you trust the way you protect your computer, it's a great solution . It saves time and money

I am waiting until they invent the slot where you can put the money into your computer and it comes out at the other end. We have the same problem in Canada. I know we can walk down to the Mall or pay the bill at the bank, but there are times when we want to write long letters and what about us writers? I am working on a novel, and now I have to save money to pay for the postage and that is not just that but I have to send numerous copies to agents to see who will look at my work. And then there are the ordinary businesses that you have to mail checks to. Our stamps are now over 51 cents each and when you count on the cost of the envelopes, the checks, etc. it is not cheap.

Why does this not surprise me? Just the other day my husband needed a stamp. I gave him a couple, a 39 cent and a 2 cent. Yep I still have some of both left. LOL Anyway, I half jokingly asked him if the price of stamps had gone up again, this way we could put the correct amount of postage on the envelope. He didn't know so I looked it up online and couldn't find anything about it on the USPS site, so we took our chances and mailed it off. I think the price of stamps is just ridiculous and try my best to avoid using this method. Too bad they don't drop the price instead, maybe that would help with sales.

I'm not surprised at all. They gave us the option of those forever stamps or whatever they are called for a reason right? As for online bill paying I've done that for years and have always found it very easy.

To be honest, I'm constantly amazed at how cheap it is to send a letter. Granted, it costs the same to send something across town as it does to send it across the country but just stop and ponder that for a minute: for less than fifty cents you can drop a letter in a metal box, someone comes and picks it up, countless other people in between tend to it all the way to its destination and it arrives on the recipeint's doorstep, usually within a day or two, three or four if it's making its way clean across the Fruited Plain. I can remember it costing 19 cents to mail a letter. The year I went to college it went up to 21. Fifteen years later and it's going to be twice that. In fifteen years it's only gone up 21 cents. The price of gas has tripled in that amount of time, what it costs to pay those postal workers has also increased, not to mention wear and tear on all the vehicles used to transport the mail. My point: there's no use in complaining. They could be charging a lot more for their services, especially with the wallop the post office has taken since the advent of the information age. A decade ago I mailed nine bills a month. Today, I mail zero. It's all done online, via direct debit or through my bank. I also don't send letters anymore. Why bother when I have instant message and e-mail (nevermind that long distance charges for phone service are going the way of the Model-T and it costs next to nothing to have a real-time conversation that eliminates the need for a letter altogether)? Be prepared for an increase every year and be prepared for them to become sharper as their services become more obsolete. There will come a time when the postal service will be used solely to deliver parcels and mailing letters will be a premium service, far more expensive than it is now. I think we'll see it during my lifetime.

Guess it's time to stock up on those Forever stamps!

Really now. I dont know. I presently work for a company who's tied up with USPS. We manufacture postage machines. I haven't heard any update from the management that the postage would go up again this year. Normally, we're the first to know if there would be an increase.