Last Call for Stamps!

As I’ve noted before, postage rates go up on Monday. That means Saturday is your last chance to hoard Forever stamps at the current price.
A few days ago I mailed a package at the postal counter and decided to buy a few 1-penny stamps because I’m not going to use up all my (non-Forever) 41-cent stamps before the deadline. The fellow working behind the counter had to check three or four places before he finding them. This surprised me; certainly with the rate change coming, people would be stocking up on the Forever stamps and those would be the difficult ones to find.
What I learned from the guy is that the way it usually plays out is that after the rates go up, people overestimate how many of the “make-up” stamps they need and over buy. Consequently, for a few weeks after the rate increase, it’s the “extra” stamps that are scarce.
That’s certainly consistent with what happened to me following the previous increase.

3 thoughts on “Last Call for Stamps!”

  1. And Monday will be the very first day you will be able to buy a Forever stamp at the magical price of 42 cents!
    However, you can purchase the stamps online, so its possible you could buy 100 for $41 on Sunday. (I’ve put the link in the header)

  2. Yes, but if you buy the stamps online, you have to pay shipping & handling.
    Paradoxically, you could order stamps by mail (using the form the post office distributes a few times per year) and you wouldn’t have that extra cost, even though it requires the post office to do more work than if you’d ordered them electronically.

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