We noted the bizarre editorial in the Wheeling News Register a while back that accused the USPS of having a ’sleazy strategy’ to take advantage of the apparently incredibly unwitting population of West Virginia. While criticizing the Post Office is a time honored tradition in this country, telling your subscribers that they’re too stupid to buy stamps seemed a risky strategy, especially considering the shaky finances of the newspaper industry these days.

The Molokai Dispatch, way out there in Hawaii, also expressed surprise at the Register editorial, and thinks the stamps are a good idea. But the Dispatch then proceeds to go off on a peculiar tangent of its own, touting the stamps as an investment opportunity! “An investment of a few hundred dollars worth of stamps may not pay off significantly in three or four years, but over a longer period of time- like a decade- people will start realizing several dollars worth of saving every month.”

How this is supposed to happen is not explained. If prices rise in the next ten years at the same rate that they did over the last ten, we could expect the price of a stamp in 2017 to be about 52 cents. So if you buy the “few hundred dollars worth of stamps” that the Dispatch recommends, you would, in 2017, save about 11 cents for every letter you send.

I don’t know about you, but if I mail ten letters a month, I’d be surprised. There were 42 billion single piece first class rate letters mailed in the US last fiscal year. If you divide that by 300 million Americans, that gives you a total of 140 pieces of mail per person, which works out to just over ten letters a month. At 11 cents savings per letter, that gets you a whopping return of $1.10! And of course, you could have just put the money in a run of the mill savings account.

I’m waiting for an editorial that finally puts the ‘forever’ stamp in perspective. That editorial would point out that the real story of the rate case is the shift to shape based pricing, with all of its myriad implications. It would also point out that ‘forever’ stamps are old hat in many European countries, where no one has grown fabulously wealthy from speculating in them, and no postal authority has gone bankrupt because of them.

That editorial would conclude that ‘forever’ stamps are convenient, and do just what they advertise- allow you to buy the right to mail a letter any time in the future. If that’s what you’re in the market for, buy some. If not, don’t. End of story.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under postal, rate increase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.