So I went to buy stamps at a small convenience store, and I say, “I’d like a book of stamps please.” And the guy goes, “How many?” I look down and realize he’s selling them individually, not by the book.
“Okay,” says I, “I’ll still take 20.”
And I hand him 8 bucks. He looks at me and says, “It’s 10 dollars.”
“Shouldn’t it be $7.40?”
“No, they’re 50 cents each.”
And I left. Is he allowed to do this? I thought stamp prices were mandated by the government?
Stamp prices are mandated by the government when they are sold by the government. Anyone else can sell them for whatever people will pay. There used to be these stamp vending machines all over my college that sold stamps at a premium. I assume they still have those around some place too.
Think about stamp collectors. Someone can sell you a $10,000 dollar stamp from 1948 yet you could still use it as partial postage today if you wanted to.
The convenience store can also sell you a ten-dollar bill for fourteen dollars, if you’ll pay that. In fact, most things in a convenience store cost more than you’d pay if you were willing to go to a real grocery store (or if you had time.) You’re paying for, uh, what’s that word, convienience. The Kwik in Kwik-E-Mart is the most important part.
Did you ever have the urge to just go into a convenience store and ask for a pound of convenience, sliced thin? Just me? Huh. 
Yep. Or a dollar. Or, I think one store sells them for a tiny loss.
The store bought the stamps from the government at the government’s price. Thus the stamps are their property, and they can resell them for whatever price they choose. It’s just like the guy who has the vending machines in our clinic–he buys sodas and snack in bulk at Sam’s, and then resells them to us at a higher price. He only marks things up about 100%, but there’s no legal barrier to him marking it up 10000%. Of course, nobody would buy his stuff at that price, but he’s free to set it.
Rolls of coins are sold at currency exchanges for premium prices as well.
There are exceptions to this. One being reselling event tickets. Many states have laws stipulating the % you can sell a ticket over it’s face value. Just because you own something doesn’t mean you can sell it for whatever you want.
However, as far as stamps are corcerned, yes, you can sell it for whatever the market will bear.
Next time, go to the post office. Just a suggestion. 
I bought stamps at a Wells Fargo ATM once, and was shocked at the markup. No wonder there are ads on every screen begging me in vain to buy stamps again.
What about lottery tickets? Is it legal to engage in markup?
Or to look at it another way, what would be the convenience store’s incentive to sell stamps at all if it had to sell them at the same price it cost the store to buy them. The store stocks the stamps in order to give its customers the convenience of buying stamps there rather than at the post office. It has to charge more in order to cover the cost of obtaining the stamps and to justify the investment of its money in the stamps to begin with.
The store is doing nothing wrong whatsoever, especially given the fact that it has to pay the government full price for the stamps to begin with.
Actually from what I understand you can only sell a ticket at x % over it’s face value if you are within a certain radius of the event medium itself. I know that as someone who’s gone to a lot of Pittsburgh Pirates, Balitmore Orioles, and New York Yankees games there is a radius right in the stadiums’ general area where you see tons of people scalping tickets. This is where you will get tickets that are more expensive than they are from the ticket office, but not horrifically more. One time I was talking to an event staff guy while waiting in line and I remarked that I had “heard scalping was illegal” and he said “nah, they can sell them almost up to the gates as long as they don’t overcharge too much.”
For Pirates games about 4 blocks away from PNC you saw people selling behind the plate seats for like $800 or something insane like that. But this was the All-Star game way back when, I don’t think many regular season Pirates games have cost that much in a long long time :).
I also don’t think there is anything illegal about the online auctions that overcharge so much for tickets.
I’ve shopped a few times on ebay for tickets and I often see people selling some cheap trinket with the “added-on bonus” of tickets to a game. Like, a cheap plastic NFL Football bank + four 50-yard-line Lions-Bears season-opener tickets.
I thought this was to avoid scalping laws by making the actual bidded-on item something besides the actual tickets.
Is this practice unnecessary, or are there anti-scalping laws on the internet?
Good point. When you live in New York City, though, getting to a Post Office isn’t always a possibility. I had never been to this store (I have no idea why I originally called it “my convenience store” in the thread title) and just couldn’t remember seeing someone with such a markup on stamps. Of course, I usually buy stamps at Pathmark, the grocery store, and they sell them at 37 cents each. So I guess it just never occurred to me that they were allowed to mark them up if they wanted to.
That’d probably be at least a violation of the retailer’s agreement with the lottery commission. Whether or not it would be illegal, I don’t know and it might depend on the state.
That would just be the best thing ever. Has anybody ever done anything like that? I would love to do that.
If you think stamps are a rip-off, try CoinStar. The one by my house will buy a dollar’s worth of change for 92 cents.
The other day I saw a woman dumping an entire shopping bag full of change into the machine.
I believe this was done in an 80’s movie starring Richard Pryor (Brewster’s Millions, IIRC). The premise of the movie was the protagonist would inherit $300 million, provided that he first had to spend $30 million in 30 days with nothing to show for it. One of the purchases he made was a very rare stamp for $1.1 million, which he then used to mail a postcard to some random person.
Paying 8 cents on the dollar to have a machine count a shopping bag full of change in less than 4 minutes seems fair to me. I do it all the time.