I had an opportunity to do some Spring cleaning this weekend, and lo' and behold, I found a postcard that I had written to a friend while I was in Costa Rica. Funny enough, it was dated May 30, 2005, and almost an entire year has passed! It had been buried and wedged in a zipper pouch of my suitcase following me along on my merry travels until now. I remember at the time, I didn't bring my address book and had forgotten her street address, so of course I thought I would just finish up and send the postcard along after I got home, after all, the postcard said it was from Costa Rica, and since my friend was in Canada, getting it from the US a few days later would still be an international shipment. :-)
I went to the post office today, and it costs $0.55 to send one from here to Canada, however, there is no $0.55 stamp available. Fortunately, they did have a $0.60 stamp otherwise with the new postage increase, I would have had to string together two $0.24 stamps, three $0.02 stamps and one $0.01 stamp which would have covered up the postcard! Had I sent the postcard from Costa Rica (as I had originally intended), it would have been 55 colones or roughly only $0.11.
It made me wonder in this age of electronic fund transfers why we don't have a global postage system with electronic fund transfers? Why couldn't we just buy a postcard that included the postage in it? Respective governments would collect the postage upfront and in essence have a non-refundable revenue stream for those countless number of postcards that are purchased and never sent similar to pre-paid calling cards that are purchased from phone companies every year that are never used by consumers.
It turns out the US Postal Service is considering offering its first version of the "forever" stamp at $0.42/each. Customers can purchase as many of these stamps at that rate which could be used until their supplies are dwindled hedging against rising postage prices. When the post office issues a new stamp at say $0.45/each, customers can continue to use their previous versions of the "forever" stamp. After just raising prices in January this year, this new price increase is anticipated to be released in May 2007 for domestic letters. Now if they can just come up with a standard for International postcard postage. Then the next time I leave a postcard in my suitcase, at least it would have the correct postage on it!
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