by Craig Ruff
May 16, 2009

Price of Stamps Rising This Week (The New York Times headline, Sunday, May 10, 2009)

On the morning of April 15, I visited the Okemos post office.

After 20 minutes, I reached what was the end of the line, but not the end of my tether. Fifty percent of the clerks (one) had a “Closed” sign at hand and headed off to break.

The surviving clerk chatted away with some habituate, whose most recent personal history and needs, along with weather patterns, had to be dealt with prior to departure. It wasn’t more than another 20 minutes of clerk-perp chitchat before the horrifying “See ya tomorrow” exit line.

“Waddya want?” the clerk asked me in a “I spit in your general direction” way.

“I’d like to send this envelope to Lansing city government. It’s my income tax return. I don’t know how much it costs to send.”

In his drawer was a sleeve. He inserted my envelope into it. The envelope fit, but barely. The clerk adjudicated: “Might go regular. But, I’d go parcel post.” Precisely how I wished him to go.

I went parcel post. Then I went postal.

“Will stamps go up in price in May?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Ah, when?”

“Something like the 11th.”

“So I have to buy some little stamps to go with the big ones pretty soon?”

“Yeah.”

“If I bought ‘forever stamps’ are they good?”

“Yeah.”

“But for sake of argument, if you knew that I had somewhere between 20 and 300 “not-forever” stamps, what would you suggest?”

“Buy new, add-on stamps or all the mail will come back at ya.”

“Well, I’d guess that my stamps (not the ‘forevers’ just the ‘I’m okay for a little while stamps’) are a few months’ old.”

“Those have to be 42-centers.”

That is when I discovered that a 42-cent stamp bought around holiday-card season was inflation-proof for a matter of weeks in an age otherwise known as deflationary.

“I’d like to purchase that parcel-post for my tax return, buy 50 two-cent stamps, and lay hands on a hundred ‘forever’ stamps.”

“We’re out of the ‘forevers’ so come back another time.” (I should have gotten the habituate’s phone number.) “Would that be a check, credit, or debit?”

“Would credit card be faster?” I asked.

“What difference does that make?”

From that exchange I draw the following life lessons, Kiplingesque:

#1: If you think that a competitive marketplace, like banking, is evil, please try out a monopolistic, governmentally sanctioned entity.

#2: If you think that Seinfeld’s Newman was simply a caricature, you are so mistaken.

#3: If, as Woody Allen suggested, there is no fate worse than death aside from being visited by a life insurance salesman on a Wednesday evening, try visiting a U.S. Postal Service office.

#4: If you can find any entity charging you 5 percent more than a few months ago for worse service, let me know.

The Postal Service lost $2.8 billion last year and is $2.3 billion in the red so far this year. Its leaders ascribe the losses to the Internet and a recession that dampens mailed advertising by businesses. Its only recourse is to raise prices, roughly 5 percent more than the rate of inflation, which is, in technical terms, zilch.

Government — its standards for customer service, sensitivity to consumers, and price-consciousness of the monopolies that it controls — can be field-tested at the Postal Service’s nearest office.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.