Your 2 Cents

As Steven Wright (or perhaps it was George Carlin) once said, "It's a penny for your thoughts, but you have to put your two cents in. Somebody's making a penny." Well, you may have more trouble living up to your end of the bargain starting Monday, May 14th, as the U.S. Postal Service will be raising the price of stamps by two cents. [Aside: I love this statement from their website: " The new price structure will create a more efficient mail system so that the overall cost of using the mail is as low as possible." What a bunch of twaddle! What the new price structure will do, among other things, is make first class stamps more expensive.]

As far as I'm concerned, they're bitches. Not because the price of stamps is going up. That kind of makes sense. Things get more expensive all the time, and, to be fair, we can send a letter anywhere in the country for very little money. Not that we want to, because, being fair yet again, who the hell sends letters anymore, aside from grandmothers giving their grandchildren $12 birthday checks?

Still, once in a great while, I have to mail something, and a book of stamps typically lasts me more than a year. What I don't like is that the new price structure will require me to buy a strange number of two cent stamps that I will then have to remember to put on mailings. I should totally be able to trade my stamps in for some sort of non-priced first class stamp. Sure I would still have to go to the post office to get them, but at least I wouldn't have to remember to put on two different stamps to get the right total postage. Or, there should be some sort of grace period in which my old 39 cent stamps are still recognized as valid. Hmm. I guess that would mean that the same problem would crop up at the end of the grace period. So the trading in is better.

Really, they should just not print stamps with prices on them. They should all just be first class letter, postcard, etc., and they should be valid until the end of time. Apparently, someone actually came up with this idea and implemented: forever stamps. That doesn't really help me with my old stamps, but yadambetcha that I'm not buying any other types of stamps from now on.

You have a good day. I'm going to count out a bunch of pennies to pay for my new two cent stamps.