How Not To Order Stamps
Last week, at 7:45 Tuesday morning, I placed an order for two sheets of 39-cent stamps from USPS.com. $1.00 shipping and handling. I naively fantasized that they would be waiting for me when I got home that day. They were not.
Nor were they in our mailbox the day after that. Not Thursday, nor Friday and — you know what’s next, right? — certainly not Saturday.
Jessica thought I was a bit crazy for buying them online and paying $1.00 to have them sent to me when I could just go get them down the street. However, the problem with going to the post office is that, unless you are unemployed, they are closed when you want to go. 1:00pm is closing time at our local office on Saturdays. 5:00pm weekdays. This is easily explained, however: our local postal workers are avid joggers and cyclists; they prefer to get their exercise in during daylight hours and participate in charity races on Saturday afternoons. Also, when polled, the American public overwhelmingly expressed their lack of interest in going to the post office outside of their own working hours. Yes. (Wondering about the stamp vending machines? Ours was broken last weekend. Convenient.)
So it seems that buying stamps online is a foolish endeavor. Jessica was right. Was it so ridiculous to imagine that the good union workers at our local post office check the web orders on a daily basis, chuck some stamps into an envelope (surely they have those), and toss it into their sorting bin for delivery? I’ve learned my lesson. Next time I’ll buy stamps at QT or Kroger.
Last night we had dinner with Jessica’s folks and brother Jeff, and briefly shared perspectives on the cost of mailing letters. Jessica’s dad can remember the days of 3-cent First Class postage, while her mom remembers 7-cent stamps. Today we pay 39 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country, which they feel is getting pretty expensive, and thus reason to consider using online bill pay. While I did share with them my positive opinion of online bill-pay, I didn’t share my opinion on 39-cent postage: I consider 39 cents to be pretty inexpensive.
Think of it: for 39 cents you can send a rectangular letter up to one ounce in weight anywhere in the United States. For 39 cents I can have somebody carry a letter from the curb outside my house, across the country, into the darkest foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and drop it into a mailbox with bull horns sticking out the side (for example).
Amazing, particularly when you consider that, for a lousy dollar, I can’t get somebody to bring me some freakin’ stamps from two miles down the street in a timely manner.
January 30th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
You’re right about the stamps being inexpensive. They’re really cheap. The most annoying thing about the postage rate is that if I buy stamps they will have changed the rate before I get a chance to use all of them. (And I’m far too lazy to use the 1c stamps to make up the difference).
The problem with ordering the stamps online is that they are most likely going to mail them to you. So your $1.00 in shipping and handling is most likely paying the salary of someone in Bangalore to stuff the envelope and then the $0.39 to mail it to you. It takes a long time, but what were you expecting for 39 cents?