Effective today the price of a postage stamp drops from 49 to 47 cents. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/08/news/companies/stamp-price-decrease/
I don't use postage stamps very often, but when I do buy them I get a book of the Forever stamps - which are good forever. The news caught my ear because there hasn't been a decrease on over 90 years.
Evidently, stamps are a great deal cheaper there than in the UK. We have first and second-class postage here, though you wouldn't really want to use second-class unless you weren't bothered about how long your letter was going to take to be delivered. A first-class stamp here costs 64p, which I calculate to be 91 cents in the US. Second-class is 55p, so it's not even that much cheaper.
I had to be a brat and look this up to see if you were trying to pull our collective legs, @Arlene Richards . First time in nearly 100 years... wow. I'll have to read up on the reasoning. I thought I'd never see that happen!
Whoopie! From now on I will forgo any emails and will always handwrite letters and snail mail them. I was just waiting for some deep savings.
Nice to see a decrease in something! I so rarely snail mail anything anymore, but at least the stamps I have should do the job... most of which are the Forever ones anyway.
It was my weekend to hide from the news. Today I've been hearing it all over, yep. But you broke the scoop to me... so I'll probably start calling you "Scoop"... that's a nickname of honor in journalism. Hope that's okay. I'm like that. In all seriousness, though, I truly never thought I'd see *anything* like that reduce in price.
Oh wow a whole two cents that must of really hurt the government to do. Please, they still haven't learned what the fast food industry did lower your prices and more customers will come. But than what do I expect many haven't learn this secret. The bottom line is people flock to a deal and having high prices only turns them away not get them to want to spend money. I will admit that I am always looking for a good buy.
The rate decrease is not to entice people to use the mail or to give a "good deal". The postal service was ordered to decrease the rate by its regulator. People have been using email and paperless billing and will continue to do so. While two cents doesn't seem like much it adds up to millions.
That's a first, I believe?? They have to because they finally have competition, email, as if you didn't know
At the same time, the Postal Service stopped home package pick-ups. Handy for those who sell on eBay, you used to be able to schedule a package pick-up with the post office and they'd pick up a package at the same time that they delivered the mail. Now they will do that only if it fits into the mail box, requiring several trips to the post office. My wife had started using the postal service instead of Fedex when they started doing home pickups. Now I guess she'll be back to Fedex.
Just 2 days prior to the decrease we bought 2 book of stamps. On the news 2 days later we heard the news and felt sad for the postal department for they will be loosing money because of the decrease. We didn't feel bad for buying the 2 books of stamps for the postal dept. needs the money. We just sold some old envelopes with old postage on it from my Grandmother's days and we got a little money for it, so we are happy about postage stamps. We go to our local Hawaiian Island Stamp and Coin shop right in the heart of town to sell our coins (we had a little grocery store way back in the 40's) and well lucky for us Grandma loved to write for we got to sell her envelopes!