I am curious as to whether or not U.S. postage stamps ever stop being good. I’m asking because I have a few 32 cent stamps from back when that was the rate and they have valentine’s style decor on them. I’m pretty sure I can still use these, am I right?
Also, I have some 34 cent stamps with an american flag on them. Just an american flag though, I only know their valuse because they’re still in the little book they came in. Will the USPS know their value if I use them along with an additional 3 cents postage??
This also makes me wonder: could really old stamps be used as postage still? Like for example, stamps that were used back when the USPS first came about?? (i realize this would be ill-advised due to the value i’m assuming those stamps have)
US stamps and coins do not expire. You could use very old stamps for their face value. In fact, stamp dealers do this quite often. For example, people would collect sheets of stamps incorrectly thinking that they will become more valuable in the future. They’ll end up as part of an estate. Stamp dealers will buy them for 50 cents on the dollar and use them to mail things like catelogs to potential cusotmers.
Just remember, while you can still use a 32-cent stamp, you can’t use it to mail a first-class letter without adding another 5 cents’ worth of stamps!
The tough ones are the “letter” stamps, issued by the post office when a rate increase was coming, but they weren’t sure how much is was going to be. So, they’d print up a bunch of “F” stamps, for example, for the new first-class rate. Once the new rate was set at, say, 29 cents, the post office would sell them for 29 cents apiece, and you could mail a first-class letter with one of them. At the time, everyone knew how much they were worth, but years later, it can be tough to figure out.
I won’t ask where you did this. The first adhesive postage stamp, the UK Penny Black (1840), was in a 1-penny denomination, and the first US “carrier stamps” (stamps which prepay postage) were issued in .01 or .02 (1836 to 1863) . This is the type of stamp that you use to drop a letter in a postal box.
Prior to that, postage stamps were like the tax stamps tha the colonists had protested before the revolution: they recorded the amount paid at the Post Office for a given package, but were not issued to the public to stick on letters at their own discretion.
It takes a substantial infrastructure to individually weigh bagloads of mail, after the fact, to check that proper postage was afffixed. A letter with insufficient or missing postage costs more to process than a properly stamped letter, yet with under-postaged letters, the USPS hasn’t been paid, and may never be paid. We’re used to that idea today, but 200 years ago, it seemed like a intractable quandary.
Canada raises first-class postage every few years. The post office always sells one-cent stamps so that people can use up stamps they have left from the previous year.
Here in the UK, for the past 15 years or so we’ve had stamps labelled “1st” and “2nd”, as well as the normal stamps that have the value in pence. If you just ask for “first class stamps”, you’ll get these “non-value indicators” as they are called.
The good thing about these is that they are valid for that rate of postage permanently, no matter what the rate was when you bought them and what it is now. For instance, when they came out in… (Google check)… 1989, the rates were 20p for 1st class and 15p for 2nd class, I think. Nowadays they are 28p and 20p respectively, but you can still use those stamps without additional postage. The Royal Mail doesn’t get many things right, but this is one of them.