The cost of postage stamps has gone up again.  Stamps, children, are used to deliver e-mails when the Internet is broken. Which it never really is. At least not long enough to get a letter delivered.

It seems we are using fewer and fewer stamps, and as an incentive to use more, the cost keeps increasing. It’s a reverse of the economic law of supply and demand which has been around at least since Adam Smith, if not John Locke, both of whom also knew about stamps but apparently couldn’t convince the Postmaster. That same backward logic, by the way, seems to be the revenue model of newspapers, with much the same result.

Now, I know all about the cost of postage being a great bargain and much, much lower than in Europe and other unfortunate non-American areas. And that’s all well and good, but not really the point.

There’s talk of eliminating Saturday mail delivery to cut costs. This idea is met with great horror by people who seem perfectly fine with not getting junk mail on Sunday but can’t imagine living without it on Saturday. Given the amount of useful mail that comes to our house, they could cut back to once a week, or less, and I don’t think I would notice.

But the post office is sensitive to bad publicity and just can’t bring itself to pull the plug on Saturdays.  Their motto after all is not, “neither rain nor snow nor Saturday morning…”

That same fear of being criticized gets us back to the cost of stamps. To stop people from bitching about paying an entire extra penny for a stamp, the post office invented something called the “forever” stamp.  Buy it now, at the going rate, and no matter what happens in the future you can still use the same stamp.  The price could triple and your Christmas card will still get across country with just one ten-year-old “forever” stamp. 

It keeps them from having to print one-cent stamps, which may cost as much to print as they bring in, particularly when you consider the clerks who have to miss their lunch hour to serve the long line of people waiting to buy fourteen cents in one-cent stamps. 

The forever stamp is an idea that would have sent Adam Smith frothing at the mouth, unless of course the post office can freeze all its expenses too.  For instance I think the concept of “forever” gasoline has real merit, at least until Exxon Mobil has a cash flow problem.  And given their current profit margin that could be, oh I don’t know, forever.