What was the price? They charged me .41 each yesterday.
It was .41. :o I thought if I bought them now, before the price went up on Monday, they’d be .39.
Thanks.
The postal worker in question may be almost too stupid to produce CO[sub]2[/sub], but in this case she was simply hearing “rate” and thinking “cost”.
It’s possible she didn’t understand the difference or perhaps she’d had a particularly tough day dealing with the queued masses who would hand her a thing and ask the cost to ship it. When you showed up, her brain was just too tired to shift gears. That, or the idiot thing. Either way, nice pitting.
Why would they need to change the design to increase the rate? That’s the whole point of having no price printed on them. I assume they don’t redesign milk cartons down there every time they raise the price of milk.
Regarding the OP; after about the second exchange I would just have asked for the one dollar stamps. If someone’s not getting it, they’re just not getting it.
That might have been the best option, but I didn’t actually know what denominations of stamps were available - which is why I was asking in the first place.
mischievous
That’s an interesting question. My first thought was that if the post office started selling the Liberty Bell stamps for more in the future, then someone who bought a bunch of them now could sell them for the higher price later and make a profit that I’m sure the post office would rather have. I guess they could still do that even if the post office printed a new design though. It probably wouldn’t be a good return on the investment anyway.
I don’t suppose they would have to change the design, but just before the next rate increase, whatever design they offer will be for a higher price than now. If they don’t change the design, postal workers would have to be told that the Forever stamp’s cost, as of Date X, is now $Y instead of $Z.
If they do change the design, the postal workers would know what to charge just by looking at the face of the stamps, and ignore the date. And they would have to discard any old Forever stamps in inventory, or people would just buy those instead.
So I guess it could work either way.
Yeah, but the OP is talking about the United States Post Office. So the sarcasm is kind of misplaced.
Yeah, you’re right. I was probably a bit touchy, but we get the same sorts of things said about us here. People treat those on the other side of the counter as dirt, but when that counter is in an enterprise related to the government in some way (Post Office, railway ticket office, etc), they get treated as something less than dirt.
That, and USPS employees are my postal cousins. 
I think it was just the smugness of “So that is the level we’re dealing with here.” that got up my nose.
Guess what: the HTML and PDF rate charts at that site, half an hour before the new rates go into effect, are still showing the old rates. :smack: I’m not usually a USPS basher, but this strikes me as really stupid.
BTW, the clerk the OP encountered may not be as stupid as the OP and others here are assuming. The new rates are reportedly much more complicated than previous rates and include different rates for letters and flats based not on their weight, but on their size and shape. So it is not necessarily just a matter of weighing the item. Although the clerk obviously failed to communicate this clearly, it might have been at the heart of her insistence that she had to see the package to provide a rate.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/13/mail.shape.ap/index.html
The cost to mail something is going to also depend on the size and shape of the envelope/package. Perhaps that’s why the postal worker couldn’t tell you the cost to ship sight unseen.
on edit: what Commasense said.
I’ve had some experiences with the Bulgarian postal service that make me long for the efficiency and politeness of the USPS.
Be grateful the even have information on their website. Seriously. It could be worse.
mischievous–
If you have a scale, and if you have a printer, and a credit card, you can go online, type a mailing label, and get the exact amount of postage printed out (and charged to your card). It’s very easy.
I do this using the shipping labels that are a whole 8½x11 page, even though the label only uses half the page. But I’ve also used plain paper and taped it on. Then just set it by the mailbox. (Or in the mailbox, if you have one big enough…I don’t.) The carrier picks it up.
For some reason you can’t drop it into a box, it has to be picked up at your house or office, or taken to a post office. You can even go on-line and request a pickup. Much easier than waiting in line.
I went to New York City’s 24 hour post office yesterday to take advantage of the last day before the rates went up. I had to mail some packages overseas.
Me and everybody else :smack:
And now apparently everyone’s trying to download the new rate sheets from usps.com at the same time, and overloading the servers. My attempts to get the new international rate charts keep timing out. Grrrrr…
Okay, if anyone else wants the new first-class international rates, they’re on page 36 of this PDF document: FileNotFound | Postal Explorer.
Funnily enough, my co-worker went to the post office on Saturday to mail a couple of packages. The woman who weighed and metered her package said “Oh, just so you know, these might come back to you because the new rates start on Monday, and since these packages have the old rate, they might not be able to send them.”
WTF? If she’s paying for postage on Saturday, why would the fucking things come back?
E.
This comes up every time that the this topic gets mentioned, but it’s really inconsequential. There’s no way that anyone could stockpile enough of the stamps to make a significant impact on the USPS’s profit, and the return on doing so would be approximately inflation. There’s a time value to money, and anyone stockpiling stamps is letting the USPS have all the temporal monetary advantage.