41 Cent Stamps Forever!

Filed in archive General on March 27, 2007

If you didn't know, the cost of a first-class postage stamp is going up to 41 cents starting May 14. As you also know, postal rate increases are a pain in the tush because unless you time it right you have to buy a bunch of two-cent stamps or whatever the difference is between the old and new rates in order to make use of your old first class stamps.

The U.S. Post Office is finally wising up (just in time for the majority of us to completely swear them off by using e-mail and online bill paying to avoid dealing with stamps in any form). The next batch of first-class stamps will be "Forever" stamps, meaning they won't have a value printed on them and you can use them, of course, forever, on any bill or letter going first class. In other words, if you buy a Forever stamp at 41 cents and in the future they raise the first class rate to 45 cents, you can still use the Forever stamp you bought at 41 cents, without going through the cost and hassle of getting new stamps to make up the difference.

You would think they would have done this a long time ago, but of course it makes too much sense, and so they kept on churning out millions of two- or three-cent stamps whenever a rate change occurred, which probably cost them as much as they made by upping the rate, at least in the short term. With the Forever stamp, problem solved.

The introduction of the Forever stamp has given me an idea, a wonderful, awful idea. I'm going to stock up on these new "Forever" stamps at 41 cents. In fact, I'm going to buy, like, $410,000 worth of these stamps. Then in the future, when the first-class rate goes up to 45 cents, I'm going to stand in front of the post-office and be all like "Hey, I'll sell you a Forever stamp for 43 cents" and I'll make two cents on every single stamp. That's a $20,000 profit once I've sold all of the one million stamps in my possession. Smart, huh?