By that argument, money itself has no value. If you acquire a $1000 bill and see to it that it is never spent, then the government makes seigniorage of about the same amount.
I think the point is that they have only one legitimate use, to mail postage in the US. There’s no other function they serve. A $1000 bill can be used to purchase all sorts of goods and services. It is widely accepted and can legally be used for any debt.
Granted, if you can get someone to accept a postage stamp as payment it can be used to purchase goods and services, but not many people will take stamps in exchange.
Where I used to work (this is UK) we got rid of our franking machine and purchased a load of discounted stamps from ebay from a highly-rated seller.
We were wary but they looked, felt, seemed legit.
We used maybe a couple of hundred for our Christmas cards.
One was returned by the post office marked “counterfeit”.
All the rest were (presumably) delivered.
The USPS* makes a profit of nearly 55 cents. This post reports a claim that there’s $2 billion in unused stamps (including collectors) out there which is almost all a gain to the USPS. (And it uses that fabulous term: seigniorage.)
For the USPS there’s a range from special issues intended for collectors all the way up to everyday first class stamps printed by the millions. (These usually have an American flag or, for some reason, the face of the Statue of Liberty replica in Las Vegas. Which ended up costing the USPS $3.5 million for copyright violation.)
- I doubt the United States Pharmacopeia, those “units” people, make any money on stamps.
He meant “cost”, not “value”. It costs almost nothing to make a stamp or a $1000 bill, so if you manage to sell it to someone, you do in fact make seignorage profit in that amount.
A stamp has value very close to $0.55, and a $1000 bill by definition has a value of $1000. But seignorage is real profit. Some of them will get lost/destroyed/collected forever, and those ones are profit to the printer.
If ‘value’ is the monetary worth of something then a stamp or a banknote has no actual value. It represents something of value but is not valuable in or of itself.
Yes, you’re right. I was just pointing out an anomaly in your original observation, or at least in how you phrased it.
It must be different in Canada. A dozen or so years ago, I bought a roll of 100 forever stamps at Costco for $51.50 when the post office was charging 53 cents a piece for them. I doubt that Costco was dealing in stolen goods or losing money, so I assume they were not paying more than $50 for them. I’m still using them, although we send less and less mail every year.
Another source may be purchases of inventories from bankrupt or closing out businesses, where the stamps may be part of a job lot of “6 boxes of assorted office supplies- $10”.
This is my vote.
2 years ago my non-chip card was “scanned” at some restaurant or gas station I patronized. I got an alert from my credit card company that someone was trying to purchase hundreds of dollars worth of stamps at a post office in North Bumfunk, Texas with my “card”. They didn’t get away with it that time, but I’m sure other times they have.
They get the stamps for free via stolen cards, sell them at pure profit, and even use the stamps they bought with stolen cards to mail the stamps they sold. It’s impossible to track where stamps were purchased from unlike some consumer goods like electronics and such.