The U.S. Postal Service announced April 9 first-class stamps would rise from 78 to 82 cents July 12. Not good news but inflation is touching everything.
The problem is people are buying fewer stamps because we are sending fewer first-class letters. The good/bad news is we’ve been able to buy Forever Stamps almost since, well, forever.
Olds like me remember first-class stamps costing 3 or 4 cents. When the price rose to a nickel we had to buy 2-cent stamps to paste alongside the 3.
Now Forever Stamps bought years ago automatically rise in value and are still good to use — a nice bonus to hoarders, even if they never use the Forever Stamps.
All of which is a losing business for the post office because we are sending far fewer letters now. The 112 billion pieces of mail we sent in 2024 is only about 60 percent of its peak year in 2006.
This drop is just the first- class sector, at least for now, as prices have also steadily climbed for increased for packages and what we call junk mail. That includes all catalogues, political ads and more. Because this is an election year, we’ll see an extra dollop of third-class mail.
Meanwhile, costs for sending all that mail, including pensions and other benefits for employees, continue to increase. It is no wonder we’ve been warned services will continually be cut back or deleted.
We Olds might recall when mail was delivered in business districts twice a day. That ended decades ago. So did using the local post office as a bank to save money. We spent dimes and quarters to buy government savings stamps that could be cashed out or used to buy savings bonds. Gone now too.
It’s a vicious cycle: The more it costs to mail a letter, the more we rely on email as The fewer letters we send, the fewer stamps we buy, the more the USPS goes deeper into debt and in turn must raise prices.
There is nothing new about this struggle. When Ben Franklin became our first Postmaster General, there were branch offices in many cities and small villages. The difficulty was the time it took for a letter to get from one city to the next. Top speed was that of a horse or person walking. There was always uncertainty whether pieces would arrive or not.
The War of 1812 changed things, at least in Europe. Letters were sent to Washington, D.C., by sailing ships, then to the front lines. Tragically, the news did not reach General Andrew Jackson until after his soldiers had wiped out hundreds of young British soldiers in the Battle of New Orleans. The only good thing that came out of that blunder was Johnny Horton’s 1959 hit song about it.
After Samuel Morse patented his telegraph in 1837, Morse Code, using sets of short dots and long dashes for numbers, words, et.al. became the gold standard for transmitting messages. Now, it is used mostly by few amateur radio enthusiasts who like archaic equipment.
In 1844, when the infrastructure was in place, Morse sent the first non-experimental message on a line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., asking the apt question “What hath God wrought?” The wire was only 12 miles long, but the message was sent in seconds instead of a fast rider on a horse needing several hours. Well before the start of the Civil War in 1861, telegraph lines were strung across much of the country.
Western Union, as Morse’s company became known, crisscrossed the country, but didn’t kill off the Post Office. It did, however, kill off the privately-owned Pony Express Co. that promised delivery of a letter between fewer than two weeks. They could not fight the competition of the telegraph and railroad mail cars carrying letters.
Telephone calls and telegraph messages were expensive; stamps were cheap in comparison, thus the Post Office continued to expand. Then came the internet, one more game-changer. It still is, and until something new and better comes along, we will rely on low-cost phone systems and the internet.
Still, many us have a nostalgic fondness for mail. Remember when you were quite young how a genuine letter, with a stamp affixed in the upper righthand corner, addressed to you, suddenly propelled you into quasi-adulthood? It was special. For decades, we cheered the hearts of others, as they did us, with birthday, anniversary and Christmas cards.
My late wife Pat and I used to send more than 200 cards every December; a quarter century later it was down to 60. I suspect the trend will continue. We began receiving almost as many e-greetings as cards delivered to our mailbox.
Should you want to hear from the younger generation too addicted to their devices, take these three steps.
- Write them a letter reminding them inheritances are earned, not a birthright.
- Tell them to enjoy the $50 bill you are enclosing, and
- Sign off with “Love, from your not-yet-dead rich uncle/aunt/parent.”
That should entice them to buy a few postage stamps this year.
There is another reason the USPS is in trouble. Just after the first postage stamps were issued in 1847, the new hobby of stamp collecting began. Young boys, who yield to the temptation of collecting almost anything from autographs to rocks, started competing with each other for who had most stamps.
Soon the corner of four stamps with the sheet number, or the “plate block,” caught our attention, along with First Day Covers. For the obscenely wealthy, a full a $2 sheet of mint stamps and more could be added to their collections. Soon the then-Olds got into the act.
Publishers, realizing there was a new market for stamp albums, then stamps from around the world, expanded the offerings. Parents liked the hobby because it kept their kids off the streets and out of mischief.
One of The Olds in my hometown, Mr. Moore, ran a travel agency and was forever getting letters from all over the world. About once a month I would stop by and he’d pull out a packet of stamps. Together we would go through them, and he’d talk about each country or the design on the stamp, giving a history and geography lesson.
From my stamps I learned more about a country’s history, people and culture than anything a teacher taught in school. The Olds were sneaky that way.
For a while, stamp collecting was all the rage. President Franklin Roosevelt was an avid collector. So was King George V, who had what many claimed as the largest and most valuable collection in the world by the time he died in 1936. Winston Churchill, however, despised the avocation, thinking a hobby for boys was a waste of time for a monarch.
I am pleased stamp collecting, or philately. has made at least a partial comeback. I have inherited five albums from departed friends and family, plus plastic tubs of stamps. Maybe they took advantage of my inability to throw things away.
I’m one up on them because somewhere there is a fortune waiting to be found. And it is a perfect avocation for cold, wet days.
Meanwhile, I’ll groan like the next person about the cost of stamps, but I’m glad they are still around.
