Postage Stamps Going up to 39 Cents

[HurricaneGirl]

This will take effect on Monday January 8th.. don't forget to get some of the little 2 cent make-up stamps for mailing next week.

[HurryKane]

Aw, they ought to just hike it up to a dollar and leave it there for 10 years so we don't have the 2 cent/3 cent/4 cent/etc. extra stamps issue for a while.

[arkess7]

WHAT! I heard that the post offices had a good year and they were not in debt.......so why are they raising the price of stamps again!!!!

[gtalum]

Anytime the USPS shows a surplus, their funding gets raided by congress. This prevents them from building up any kind of a fund from which to handle fleet maintenance and replacement, building upkeep and construction, etc. So they have to constantly raise rates to pay for thei roperation. Call your congressman about it.

In the end, it's still an amazing service for $0.39, despite jokes to the contrary.

[Scorpion]

I remember when they just raised it from 31 to 32 cents.

[alicia-w]

those new 2 cent stamps are beautiful. they're pictures of a turquoise squash blossom necklace.

[alicia-w]

If you look at the rates historically, they havent risen that much....

http://www.akdart.com/postrate.html

if you consider that gas was 55 cents a gallon in 1974 and is 2.50 or more now, the price of a stamp is comparatively cheap.

[gtalum]

If you look at the rates historically, they havent risen that much....

http://www.akdart.com/postrate.html

if you consider that gas was 55 cents a gallon in 1974 and is 2.50 or more now...

Of course, 2 years ago gas was just over $1.

[alicia-w]

i dont know where you were , but in March 2004, gas was about 1.65. Over $2 a gallon in some places.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/30/news/economy/gas_prices/

[gtalum]

Okay, so maybe 4 years ago.

The national average in December 2001 was $1.06.

[TexasStooge]

Oh great, another postage price jack-up.

[JonathanBelles]

what possibly could they need the extra money 4?

[Terrell]

Noooooo, not again!!!. Thank goodness for online bill paying.

[gtalum]

what possibly could they need the extra money 4?

Yeah, I wonder, what kinds of things have gotten more expensive in the last 3 years? Hmmm....



Plus, I addressed this above. Congress raids the bank eveyr time USPS makes a surplus. Thus they have no savings to fall back on.

[Skywatch_NC]

For the sake of postage stamps hikes...I wish my neighborhood INcompetent sub letter carrier would take a hike! She's made MORE mistakes w/ mail delivery in recent months than the "moon on the man" so to say. My mother has even called our PO to complain. Go figure why this carrier isn't transferred or for that matter fired!

How I wish our excellent carrier named Cynthia that we had for a year until she got transferred elsewhere was still serving our neighborhood community!

Eric

[MGC]

If your mail is messed up blame it on technology, not your letter carrier. Your letter carrier does little in the way of sorting the mail. 99% of the mail is sorted by machine. Sometimes, the mail for unknown reasons will become out of sequence and delivery points will get crossed. Place the blame on the PO's computers that read every letter, decode the handwriting and assign a delivery point to it. Many times the computer misreads the writing on the letter and assignes the letter an incorrect zip code. The zip code on every letter is the series of bars on the front usually on the lower right hand corner of the letter. This is your address in binary form, which when optically read determines the sort destination of the letter. So, it is not your carriers fault.......MGC

[coriolis]

I just got my annual raise, so round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows!

[Skywatch_NC]

If your mail is messed up blame it on technology, not your letter carrier. Your letter carrier does little in the way of sorting the mail. 99% of the mail is sorted by machine. Sometimes, the mail for unknown reasons will become out of sequence and delivery points will get crossed. Place the blame on the PO's computers that read every letter, decode the handwriting and assign a delivery point to it. Many times the computer misreads the writing on the letter and assignes the letter an incorrect zip code. The zip code on every letter is the series of bars on the front usually on the lower right hand corner of the letter. This is your address in binary form, which when optically read determines the sort destination of the letter. So, it is not your carriers fault.......MGC

Well, we always make sure if we get a neighbor's mail erroneously that we take it to them...one time my Dad drove around elsewhere trying to find someone's house whom we received a couple pieces of important material and just today we received someone's big packet of Blue Cross insurance information. This carrier has left behind plastic mail baskets in the past on more than one occasion, also. I find it VERY difficult to believe that
it would be just postal machines. She also left a PO employee plastic strip card one time in our mailbox that shouldn't have been there obviously!

We have another carrier that comes around every now and then and he does a great job! Cynthia did a heckuva a job, too, as mentioned earlier!

[kevin]

Guess we'll have to buy 2 cent booster stamps to use up the ones we have already for the corporation.

Dangit, can't they just have a mail account and bill you at the end of the month, like the telephone?

[HurricaneGirl]

kevin, Maybe a postage meter would be better for your company mail see Pitney Bowes..