Don’t forget that @glee, and several other posters in this thread are not Americans.
As little as Americans use checks today, that’s how little Europeans or British folks used checks back in 1990, 35 years ago. Their usage has declined to very very close to zero since then because their banking is so much more advanced than ours.
As little as Americans will probably be using checks in 2070, that’s how little current people in other advanced countries use checks.
We have one quarterly bill for trash that cant be paid automatically. And when I signed up for autopay for my mortgage, it screwed up when they transferred
We have two at my D&D game, and when we mentioned checks they said yes to knowing & seeing but not writing- but they both live at home so they have less reason to pay bills.
/sold my mortgage, so now I pay by check.
Please note that this is a prediction, not a statistic you can look up. Saying that the future in regard to checks is always the same as for every country is a statement about what will happen in the future. That doesn’t mean that I know what the future in regard to checks is for any country. i’m just saying that prediction about the future is always hard.
My son is 15. He has definitely seen a check because he’s seen me write one.
My daughter is just above your age cutoff, and she has seen personal checks sent to her as gifts. However, I don’t think she has ever written a check.
My grandmother was a voracious letter writer and from the time I was in grade school until her death in 2017 I would write her several letters a year. Thus I always had stamps on hand. It’s habit I have not and probably will not ever break. They now live in a vintage Havana cigar box on my desk.
This thread made me curious and so I went and inventoried my stamp stash. I have 6 unused sheets of 20 USPS domestic Forever stamps in various designs (including for some inexplicable reason two sheets of Valentine’s Day designs) and 3 partially used sheets of Forever stamps. I have half a sheet of 34¢ stamps, which Google tells me were in production from January 2001 to June 2002. These are peel-off stamps, not the lickable kind (is that the right term?). I have 44 2oz stamps used for oversized letters as I needed them to send out funeral invitations last year. Those were $1.01 each and IIRC I bought 100. I have no idea what I’ll do with the rest. I swore I had postcard stamps as well as international mail stamps – my wife’s mother is Scottish and before social media was a thing we used to send mail to Britain fairly regularly – but now I can find neither. Now that I know I don’t have them my OCD won’t let me rest until I’ve replenished my supply.
Thankfully none of my stamps are the boring, fugly generic flag stamps.
Remember rolls of stamps? My wife has a small stamp dispenser shaped like a blue USPS drop box. It has no practical use now.
I keep all these stamps on hand because I still send out snail mail several times a month. Like the OP I have a Dr. that I pay via old-school check, and I have a couple of utilities that I can either go by their office in person and pay with cash, pay in person using a card, or send them a check. The check route is easiest. I keep a stack of #10 envelopes on my desk. There’s s a USPS dropbox on my drive to work, which is quite convenient.
Perhaps stamps are a relic of a bygone era but, unlike VHS tapes and carbon copy paper, one that does get some use in 2025.
I teach in a boarding school. My students are older teenagers. One of my classes is a basic financial literacy class. Some of my students know, in a rather vague sense, what a check is but not a single one of them has ever filled out a personal check and most have never endorsed one. One of my students told me she received a birthday check from a family member a few years ago and she never did anything with it because she didn’t know how to “turn it into real money.”
Thus we go over the whole process.
My own kids, 17 and 20, know how to fill out, endorse, and deposit a check – as well as keep track of outstanding checks.
My mom and my niece were at an impasse once over a birthday gift. My niece didn’t know what to do with a check and my mom didn’t know how to send money electronically. Mom finally learned to use Zelle.
I have about a dozen of those too.
Right now first class letter size is $0.73. By the time you use your existing stash of ~180 first class forevers, the price of a first class letter may be almost up to that $1.01 threshold. Or beyond.
You can always put too much postage on a letter. I intend to use up my 1.01s as first class postage before they become less than the price of a first class letter. Maybe not this year, but some year soon.
Oooh, envy. Tres cool! I always had the boring utilitarian dispensers.
But I would not say “no practical use now”. USPS still sells rolls of 100. For as much as you use stamps, you could still find a use for that dispenser. But they’d probably be “fugly generic flags”, so that’s your trade-off.
I just inquired as to where that little dispenser lived and my wife informed me she threw it out years ago as she was under the impression – as was I – that stamp rolls were no longer available.
FWIW this is the one she had. It gets extra coolness points for being emblazoned with Bugs Bunny.
That is even cooler than I expected. Thanks for sharing.
If you go searching on usps for the stamp rolls, it helps to know they call them “coils” not “rolls”.
For a guy who (almost) never uses postage I seem to know a disturbing amount about it.
Based on training new cashiers at work… you can extend that up to around 22. Or more.
Yes, we have new hires who have never seen a check (or if they did it didn’t register) and have zero clue how to fill one out, handle it, etc.
I also have to instruct some of the young’uns that half dollars, dollar coins, and two dollar bills are valid denominations and real money that we accept in payment. Also, people with driver’s licenses from New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska are not foreginers and their DL’s can be used as proof of age when that’s required.
This thread made me realize that of the little snail mail I still send, much of that is in pre-paid envelopes, so I don’t even need stamps for that. I’m pretty the last thing I actually mailed was my vote by mail ballot last fall. When California first went to vote by mail you had to put a stamp on it, but now they’ve changed it so that the envelope is pre-paid.
The last time I bought stamps was a sheet of 10 from the self service kiosk many years ago (so yeah, they are the fugly generic flag design). I still have three left. That’ll probably be enough to last me a few years.
I hardly ever use snailmail, but my wife does and she asked me to pick up a book of first class stamps, so I did and I was a little bit surprised to see that they’re huge now! They used to be the size of a… well… a postage stamp, but now they have to accommodate a unique 2D barcode, so they can only be used once, and I suppose that barcode has a minimum functional size.
In other bygone era things… I was just musing today on how much longer the square-ish cans of corned beef are going to be around - the kind where they open with a key that peels off a thin ribbon of metal and the can comes apart into a sort of razor sharp clamshell, exposing the block of processed meat inside.
Tins of Spam lost the key-opening method a while back, and a while before that, tins of anchovies and sardines also lost the key and just went to pull tab tops. Corned beef in square cans with a key can’t be long for this world.
Huh?
Some of them are huge, yes; that’s been true for a long time. But the stamp-size stamps are still available and common; at least, they were last time I bought some, which was about a month ago. – they don’t look any bigger on today’s USPS website.
Are you sure you can still do this? I did that until maybe 10-15 years ago, when our doctor told me they can no longer be mailed. Fortunately his office was only a few blocks away, so I walked it over.
IIRC, you are also in Canada.
Absolutely. You get a little kit that comes with a postage-paid envelope. Got one two years ago, got another one just now. But I’m in Ontario and this is all provincially managed. It may be different in Quebec.
The screening isn’t perfect but it’s a hell of a lot more convenient than a colonoscopy.
If a teenager doesn’t know that New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska are U.S. states, then they have bigger problems than one who doesn’t know how to use a check. Not knowing much about American states just shows that they haven’t learned basic things about American geography. Is this really typical of teenagers?
I would not say it is typical but it does occur with more frequency that I thought it would.
I’m in the UK. Standard postage stamps used to be about 15mm by 20mm. Now they are about 30mm by 35mm. Here’s a comparative photo (the barcode is part of the stamp):
Aha – it should have occured to me that we might not be talking about USA postage!