Today I chose to mail a letter. I’d gotten a bill from a doc via snail mail, and they don’t have an online payment facility. So I wrote my CC info on the return chit, stuffed it into their provided return envelope, and went to my little stash of postage stamps.
In there was a sheet of 10 first class forever stamps. With one remaining. I had written down the date I used the first stamp off the sheet: Apr 16 2022. Now, here on May 1 2025 I used the last of the 10. So 3 years and two weeks, 158 weeks, to get through 10 stamps.
Between wife’s and my businesses and our personal use, back in the early 90s I can recall buying them in rolls of 100 and needing a new roll the following month.
Times change.
My stash also has a sheet of 20 Christmas-themed first class forevers from the 2016 Christmas season. 10 are gone, and 10 remain. On present trends, Jun 2028 is about the earliest plausible date those will be used up. Might be a year later.
Then I can start using up the supply of odd 17 & 24 and whatever cent stamps that were bought way back whenever to pay for the cheaper second-and-subsequent ounces back when we mailed lots of 2-, 3-, and 4- ounce first class letters. Something I very rarely do now.
FYI I just checked. First class postage is now $0.73 for the first ounce and $0.28 per additional ounce up to 3.5 total. If heavier you have to use a large flat envelope and pay $1.50 for the first ounce and $0.27 (yep a penny less), 0.28, or 0.30 on a sliding scale for each additional ounce up to 13. Weird.
Anyone else have a mundane postage musing to share?
Or other stories of different relics of a bygone era you still have and still use, but just barely? IIRC that same mailing was the first time in about a month I’d used a pen at home. Signing paper CC chits with real pens at eateries out is pretty common still. But at home? I almost never use a pen.
I got my 10-forever stamps in 2019 (I remember cuz stay at home for COVID was starting and I wanted to have some stamps just in case).
I still have six left. The last thing I mailed was a few weeks ago for my tax return. The state said one thing could not be electronically submitted and I had to mail the form in (why…I have no idea…they would have been fine with everything else filed via computer and this one form added $2 to what I owed the state so I am willing to bet it will cost them more to open my mail, input whatever and file it than the $2 they will get from me).
I bought a roll of forever stamps at Costco a few years ago and now only have a few left. I live in a very rural area and often utilize services from people with home businesses. They don’t take credit cards or use PayPal or Venmo. They just mail me a invoice and I have to write a check and mail it back to them. If the US postal service ever went away they’d have to come to my house to pick up a check, which they wouldn’t want to do, or I would have to hand deliver one to them. They could easily setup a PayPal account, but they’re not very tech savvy, if you know what I mean.
I’m still paying at least two bills a month with check and stamp, so I’m still using stamps.
With recent medical bills I’m having to make various one-time payments. I find using a check and stamp less bother than setting up an “account” I will use exactly once and then sit out there waiting for a hacker to vacuum it up and sell my info on the Dark Web, so some months I use more than 2.
The guy who does my landscaping every two weeks writes down what I owe him on a scrap of paper two or three times a year and I snail mail him a check. I send him and the housekeeper a xmas card with a cash gift every year (the housekeeper gets cash when she visits).
I was surprised that my eye doc doesn’t have online bill pay when I got the invoice last month. I had to fill in my cc info and mail it to his office.
As an aside I have basically always had no faith in the postal service to deliver a letter.
I know that is ridiculous and unreasonable but when I mail a check or important document there is a part of me that just feels there is no way I drop it in some roadside box and it will manage to show up at the destination.
Again, no need to lecture me on this. I know I am not being reasonable. I would not call it a phobia but something along those lines. Partly why I still haven’t used the few stamps I have.
As an advocate of slow food and slow communication, I mail 5-10 letters a month to people in North America and Europe. We all look for interesting papers and some use wax seals on the envelopes. I have a German 1950s mechanical postal scale that is as accurate as my digital scale. Some of the group are typewriter nerds, some use dip pens, and all of it feels like a push back against the culture of “more and faster is better.”
The network was shocked and appalled to learn that Denmark is phasing out letter service soon. This is an abomination. Really, the place is so small “airmail” is a paper airplane launched at ol’ Lars. Neo-liberal austerity wreaks havoc and never considers the cost!
My PayPal account was hacked, and while it has sometimes taken almost a month to get a card from my kids sent from 300 miles away, I have never actually had something completely lost in the mail.
For the moment, I’d rather stay with the USPS when possible.
We go through a non-trivial number of stamps, maybe 4 to 5 a month. As American expats living in Europe, we still have financial business back in the States (investments and such we haven’t yet been able to move over here). Much of this has not yet been digitized so we have to sign paperwork and mail it back across the ocean. The local postal service has a single international-rate stamp that we use for this. They also have pre-printed envelopes with the postal payment pre-paid and incorporated in the price, which is convenient. And there are a few local services which ask for physical paperwork, so those get stamps as well (e.g. we recently sent in our receipts for solar panel installation to be reimbursed, and had to initial every page, so: physical mail). But the number is slowly dwindling, to be sure.
However, a couple of weeks ago we were visiting Albania, and I decided to send a personal letter to a friend of mine in the States, mostly for the novelty of their receiving a physical envelope from an uncommon point of origin. I found a nearby Albania Post office, and asked (with help from Google Translate) for a stamp that would pay for mail to the U.S. The clerk actually took a piece of paper out of her drawer, looked up the rate, tapped out some addition on a small plastic calculator, and sold me a combination of stamps that would cover the charge, which is something I haven’t seen in probably 20 years or more. And these were stamps I had to actually lick, also, rather than peel off of backing paper.
Fascinating place, Albania. I wish I’d known about this in advance because I would have prepared a letter to send back to myself, just so I’d have the artifact in my mailbox.
It has indeed been a very long time since I’ve put a stamp on anything. I believe there are a very few government documents that may have to be mailed, but I’m not certain. In general, stuff can be done either online or via federal or provincial service offices, but not absolutely always.
I just found out that our dental plan, which operates under a completely different regime than our actual universal health care system, has to be periodically renewed for some crazy reason and there’s a stupid form that has to be filled out and mailed. Which is a semi-major hassle as I’ll have to go to the post office to buy stamps. I haven’t owned stamps in years.
Fortunately, for the colorectal cancer screening test I’m due for, the poop sample can be deposited in any mailbox in a postage-paid envelope. I know it’s postage-paid, I didn’t check if the envelope says: “Caution: contains poop”.
As we (my friends and I) so often say in situations when things get awkward, “How about those Blue Jays?”
In regards to stamps, the last time I used any was to return a form to the Alberta government. I guess it could have been done online, and I tried, but after an hour of fruitless searching for an online form (I’m an old fart, and my patience only lasts so long), I picked up the phone and requested one by mail. They sent it, I filled it out, put a stamp on it, and dropped it in the mailbox.
Now, I’m down to two stamps, out of the ten I bought in 2019.
I buy a roll of 100 forever stamps (for mail within the U.S.) which will last me a long time. I buy a page of 10 forever stamps (for mail to any foreign country) which will last me a long time. I get mailed free return address stickers (mostly from charities that think I will contribute to them) which will last me a long time. I put a return address sticker on the top left of each letter and the appropriate forever stamp on the top right of each letter. I don’t think about them any more than I think about a lot of things I buy. I buy clothes and try to make them last a long time, occasionally sewing on a new button or something. I buy a book (maybe new, maybe used) occasionally, maybe keeping it forever or giving it away to someone or some organization. I buy furniture, which I keep until it falls apart. I buy food, keeping it in the freezer or in the refrigerator or in the pantry as appropriate. I don’t worry about when to buy new things in general.
