Going Postal
Today, first-class mail costs 44 cents, that’s a 2 cent increase in price. Large envelopes will cost you 88 cents, with postcards costing 28 cents. This price increase was announced in February due to rising production costs. I haven’t been able to keep track of how many times stamps have increased in price but it seems to me that just about the time I run out of those silly 1 cent stamps and get more at the new rate, a couple weeks later I’m back down at the post office getting more 1 cent stamps.
You, like me, may have heard the commercials on the radio about Stamps.com and while I really liked the idea I never pulled the trigger to actually try out this product until I caught wind of the latest price increase that started today. They made it very easy to try out with an offer for $45 in free postage which would end up saving us money over the next couple of months, even if we decided to cancel the subscription.
Now that I’ve used it…seen how easy, convenient, and simple it is to use, I’m not going to be giving it up any time soon.
Part of the draw for me is all the different packages and envelopes I send out. It might be a vendor brochure, a marketing DVD, or documents that I need to get to a prospect or client. I could never figure out the postage on my own, and would have to go to the post office a couple times a week to mail whatever I needed to mail. With Stamps.com I can weigh the package via a cool little scale that hooks up to the computer via a USB and the postage is automatically calculated for me and printed right from the computer. Thus the only trip I have it down to the end of the driveway.
Anyone who owns a home based business, this product is a must. The convenience of being able to print out postage any time I need to makes a huge difference in time management. No more trying to schedule time during “office hours” which always turns out right around lunch time (why is that?) waiting in long lines, when I could be doing something else that’s far more productive. If you’ve looked into a postage meter in the past and found it cost prohibitive, but this just might be the answer for you with even more features.
While I haven’t tried this feature yet, PhotoStamps are a new way to turn photos into US postage. I’ve been thinking about a couple of logos that I could use on stamps that would be very cool. How cool would that be? Don’t think it would match the value of the Elvis stamp for collectors, but it would be fun to have you’re own stamp to send out.
Speaking of the Elvis stamp, I found a number of fun facts about stamps that I wanted to share.
• In 2008, the Postal Service delivered 46 percent of the world’s mail.
• Consumers can expect annual — yet smaller — stamp price hikes. Congress passed a law in 2006 limiting first-class postage increases to the rate of inflation.
• If you purchased a Forever Stamp when they were released two years ago, at 41 cents each, you’ll see a 7.3 percent return on your investment when you use them for postage starting today.
• In the days before last year’s postage hike, on May 12, 2008, the post office was selling Forever Stamps at a rate of 30 million a day.
• Forever Stamps are available in 20-stamp booklets only, not in 100-stamp rolls or coils.
• Few products — in any industry — have been as successful as the self-adhesive stamp … at least during the Postal Service’s second try at selling them. The post office first tried self-stick stamps in 1974 (a 10-cent Christmas stamp), but the experiment was deemed a failure because they were expensive to produce and the stamps began to disintegrate.
• The Elvis Presley stamp is the most widely saved stamp in U.S. history.
• Debuting in 1992, the modern version of the self-stick stamp has, well, licked the traditional wet-and-stick version. By 1994, 8 percent of U.S. postage stamps were self-stick. That number climbed to 20 percent in 1995, 60 percent in 1996, 87 percent in 1999, 90 percent in 2000 and 98 percent in 2005.
• The adhesive on lick-it-and-stick-it stamps contained about one-tenth of a calorie. If you used to lick four stamps a week, you’re now saving about 20 calories a year, or about five M&Ms.
• With the Postal Service losing money ($2.8 billion in fiscal 2008), Postmaster General John Potter has felt some heat for the $857,459 he earned in salary and benefits last year. (His income would buy almost 43 million 2-cent stamps.)
• The Postal Service is an independent federal agency and covers its expenses not with tax money but with the sale of stamps, postage and postal services.
• The Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee helps decide what will appear on stamps. Among the committee’s rules: No living person can appear on a stamp; stamps must feature Americans or American-related subjects; and stamps cannot honor commercial, political or religious organizations.
• The committee has rejected ideas for a stamp featuring the 10 most-wanted criminals, one honoring world champion hog caller “Whooda Tom,” a stamp commemorating cream cheese and one with the headline “The American Taxpayer — an endangered species.”
• Over this past weekend, New York closed its last full-service 24-hour Postal Service window, leaving Chicago as the only U.S. city with a full, around-the-clock post office teller service.
• The best-selling postage stamp of all time? More than 900 million breast cancer research stamps have been sold since the stamp was unveiled in 1998. A distant second is the Elvis Presley stamp (517 million), unveiled in 1993 and no longer available.
• The Elvis stamp remains, however, the most widely saved stamp in U.S. history. The Postal Service estimates that 124 million Elvis stamps were saved rather than used.
• Even as first-class mail has dwindled, philatelists, or stamp collectors, have watched their market thrive, thanks, in part, to the Internet and auction sites such as eBay. The stamp-collecting market reached a record $1.18 billion in sales in 2007.
• The Postal Service estimates that there are more than 4 million stamp “savers” nationwide.
• The Postal Service sells about $200 million to $250 million worth of stamps to collectors each year — almost pure profit because they will never be used for postage.
• The first woman to appear on a U.S. postage stamp? Queen Isabella in 1893.
• The first African-American to appear on a U.S. postage stamp? Booker T. Washington in 1940.
• In 2008, 36.6 billion stamps were printed, about 120 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
• The very first U.S. stamps featured George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in 1847.
• No surprise: Washington has appeared on more U.S. postage stamps than any other person.
• Before stamps were introduced in the United States in the mid-19th century, letters were taken to a post office, where postage was charged based on the number of sheets of paper and the distance to the letter’s destination. The postmaster would mark the amount of postage on the envelope’s upper right hand corner. The postage could be paid by the sender, the addressee or a combination of the two.
• The most valuable stamp in the world is a Swedish stamp known as the Treskilling Yellow, which sold for $2.2 million in 1996.
• If it the Postal Service were a private sector company, it would rank 26th on the 2008 Fortune 500 list, just behind UnitedHealth Group and just ahead of Kroger and Boeing.
• Not only does the Postal Service print lots of stamps each year, it also manufactures 380,000 locks and 3.2 million keys annually.
If you’re a home based business owner, do yourself a favor and look into this service. It could end up saving you a ton of time, and in the process save you a ton of money.
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Tags: Home Based Business, Stamps.com
