Not so far as I know. In the USPS Stamps To Go program, the stamps are consigned (not sold) to the retailer, who owes USPS the full face value thereof.
However, there are a LOT of unused stamps floating around, because people and businesses buy them and end up not needing them, and then have to unload them for whatever the market will bear. (There were also periods when people bought full sheets of mint US postage “as an investment” because “they were going to worth a lot of money someday.” Now, as people downsize or kids settle their parents’ estates, stamp dealers have to explain that there isn’t much collector demand for common US stamps printed in the last 80 years or so, and there’s a vast supply. That’s why pretty much every stamp dealer in the country has stacks of mint US postage for sale at ~50-70% of face value; you just have to be willing to affix three or four or nine stamps to every envelope, to make up the current rate out of sheets of 1950s or 60s stamps.)
My mom once bought an old stamp collection at a garage sale, for less than the total face value. She figured that there probably weren’t any in the collection valuable enough to be worth researching all of them, but face value is face value, and so she just used those for her mail until they were used up.
But that was a collection, or at least an attempt at one (as I understand it, real collectors prefer stamps that have been canceled), not just whole sheets of new-ish stamps, and putting a collection up on eBay is more effort than just plunking it down on the $5 table at a garage sale you’re having anyway to clean out the attic.
The Home Depot coupons, though, I could see as maybe being legitimate. The store obviously has some sort of program for sending those coupons out to customers, and there are probably some customers who get those coupons but don’t shop at Home Depot often enough to use them before they expire. So they sell them to the eBayers at a steep discount (thus getting something for them, rather than nothing), and the eBayers sell them to people who will actually use them, at a slightly-less-steep discount. Home Depot doesn’t particularly mind, because they’re still making a profit on the prices after the coupon discount, and they’re happy to get people into the store (instead of putting off that project indefinitely, or going to some other store).
Retailers are not sold stamps at discounted prices.
Therefore in England it is considered very impolite to walk into a shop ( not post office) and buy stamps and nothing else. Thats because the shop has sold you the stamps for no profit and is doing you a service by stocking it as a easy way to buy stamps along with other things.
The brick-and-mortar big box store I work at sells stamps. We order them in bulk from the US Post Office, but we pay full price for them (I know this because I work in the office that does the ordering and keeps track of the money). We get no discounts whatsoever.
Why do we do it? It’s a service for customers. It makes us look like a convenient place to buy stuff. We make zero profit off it.
Is it also considered rude to walk into a McDonald’s and buy a double cheeseburger and nothing else? Do I risk being tut-tutted by the cashiers while my fellow patrons cry out “For shame!”?
I could maybe see someone selling 5 stamps at a tiny loss per transaction as a relatively cheap way to build up a rating. But selling hundreds of stamps for $tens or $hundreds less than cost? That’s crazy. And it also just doesn’t really make sense.
Someone is getting scammed. Once you’ve figured that out, run away, because how do you know you’re not the mark?
Worth noting, in terms of scale, that the guy I linked to above has sold 87 rolls of 1,000 stamps each. That’s a face value of over $47K being sold for about $29K, a “loss” of over $18K.
One way would be to look at feedback. I would think if the people buying the stamps are being ripped off, it would show up in the feedback and comments. In the case of the guy above, he has 100% positive feedback.
I remember when it was popular to buy mint sheets of newly issued stamps under the impression that they’d appreciate considerably in value. This was probably not a bad strategy before 1940 or so, much less so as time went on and basically nuts by the time Forever stamps came out.
I suppose it’s not impossible that some people bought up a ton of them as an “investment” or to beat future price increases, and then realized they’d never be able to sell or use them and decided to unload them for what they could get.
I was cleaning out a bookshelf this past weekend and found about a dozen 8" by 10" cards I’d collected back in the 1970s which were issued by the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving to commemorate stamp shows, each showing one or more designs of classic postage stamps and costing maybe a couple of dollars at the time. I looked a few up to see if they’d appreciated in price and lo! the most any were being sold for was about $11 and one was going for $3 or best offer on eBay.
Looks like I’m not going to get rich off those things. :(
Cite? I never heard it was rude to do so, and have several times in my life gone to the local shop just for a book of stamps. I didn’t get any negative comments for it.
Cite?
Okay, I’ve done a bit of research, and found that UK stamps are in fact sold at a discount to retailers. They don’t make a huge profit, but they do make some.
You can for example buy 50 books of first class stamps for £392, and sell them for face value at £420.
*Maybe *you could get a bigger discount if you bought 5000.
It surprises me to learn that American stamps don’t do the same.
The very next post after Nansbread1’s is mine, where I state I work in the office at my store where stamps are ordered and received from the US Post Office. We do not get a discount.
Of course, I can only speak for the US, not the situation in other countries.
That helps, but it’s not foolproof. That is, there could be multiple cons involved, and one of them might be figuring out how to fake out eBay’s feedback fraud filters.
It’s a pretty big company - 70,000+ employees, 230 stores, annual income measured in units starting with “b”… If a company that big can’t figure out how to get a discount on stamps I’m assuming it’s because no discounts are available.
And, as others have noted, the USPS has also stated that it doesn’t give discounts to anyone.
The son of a co-worker, who spent time in federal prison, indicated that forever stamps were the de-facto currency while inside. As such, he started a service where he sold items to prisoners using forever stamps for payment. As the items were sold at a premium, he was able to peddle the stamps on E-Bay at a discount and still come out ahead.
Given that the stamps themselves have almost no value; if you buy one for 55cents and don’t use it to send a letter, the USP makes a profit of 55cents.
The Royal Mail has been selling ‘pretty’ stamps for years to m̶u̶g̶s̶ people who believe that they may be worth more in years to come. The Royal Mint does the same thing with coins.
