Back on the farm, we used junk mail to start the wood stove, didn’t subscribe to a newspaper =)
Now, it gets binned - waste of resources =(
Like I was trying to point out above, it’s a trust thing. People mostly trust the USPS for getting letters delivered more or less on time, to the right address, and not tampered with. So that’s why the government and most legal type correspondence is done via the USPS, not email.
Now the COBRA people are just being assholes and introducing something to make dealing with customers more onerous, because presumably they don’t make money dealing with you or making you happy.
Do people in Denmark not use credit cards? Or any kind of small plastic/metal card? In the US, credit cards are sent in regular sized letter envelopes.
A couple of thoughts. I see no more need for the post office to make a profit than, say, the military. It need not respect boondoggles and obvious gross inefficiencies, but it doesn’t need to make a profit.
The post office has much greater responsibilities than private delivery services, such as “last mile” delivery and delivery to all sorts of places that are not cost-effective. To cover those costs, if people aren’t keen on the “no profit” idea or just want to balance the books, why not give the post office something close to a monopoly on profitable runs? Because “socialism”?
Postal service is chipped away at by private companies. In Canada, the ceo of one company is the brother of the minister for industry, and of course in the US, a recent postmaster had his own ties to the private industry. The m.o. is to lobby to be able to deliver on profitable runs, leaving the post office to cover the no profit runs, then complain that the post office loses money and should be scaled back even further. That keeps the post office from modernizing effectively, pushes it to cut services and people, making it less capable, leading to more complaints, rinse and repeat.
Also, send me your postal address and I’ll send you a typed letter so you can recall the experience.
We did our xmas cards today, using some old forever stamps my wife bought. She bought a bunch of them - thought them pretty. We realized neither of us had any idea what a stamp costs today. Do you?
78 cents!
Late 50s/early 60s - my parents used to send (and receive) so many Christmas cards. They would send me to the post office to pick up a couple of sheets of 2-cent stamps (unsealed postage in Canada at the time - each sheet was 100 stamps). It was 4 cents if you wanted to seal the envelope. The received cards were stuck everywhere - starting on the stairway to the 2nd floor (which could hold about 100 cards). My mother kept a log of names and addresses, and whether we had received/sent a card to them - updating it every year.
Huh?
Would you (or any Canadian) care to explain sealed versus unsealed? AFAIK totally not a thing us benighted USAians ever had to contend with. Why would a postal service care whether envelopes were sealed or not?
If they do care at all, ISTM sealed would be easier for them, with less flappy stuff to catch on their handling equipment and less contents falling out of envelopes, never to be reunited. So if anything, they’d want to charge extra for the folks who didn’t bother properly closing up their envelopes. So what was the rationale for charging double (or half) for that difference?
Or does “sealed” versus “unsealed” mean something other than securely gluing the envelope flap closed?
Color me (and I suppose others) baffled.
Thanks in advance.
I agree that it’s kind of a vicious circle of feedbacks, but (in Canada at least) the post office brought it on themselves – by which I mean the post office as a whole including their union, and management for not standing up to them. Of all the militant public service unions, CUPW is the most arrogant and militant of them all. Postal strikes would sometimes get so out of hand that the government was forced to enact back-to-work legislation, and CUPW leaders in the past have defied that legislation and been sentenced to prison.
The result of this militancy was inefficiencies resulting in increasingly poor service and high costs, providing an opportunity for the private sector – traditionally limited to super-fast expensive courier services – to expand into lower-cost delivery offerings directly competing with the postal service. It’s surprising that given the competitive marketplace today, the union still retains some of its traditional militancy, but it’s softened as they now try to gain public support.
That’s why I strongly disagree with your idea (in the previous paragraph that I didn’t quote) of giving the post office a near-monopoly on services with which couriers now compete. Given their history of gross inefficiency, which may not exclusively be due to the union but also to incompetent and unmotivated management, a monopoly would encourage them to become even more wasteful and uncaring. And then we’d have no good delivery services at all.
I don’t oppose the idea of public subsidies to the postal service. They shouldn’t have to show a profit, and we should support them as a public service. The problem is that Canada Post is losing so much money – a record $1.3 billion this year – that it’s just not sustainable. This is almost as much as the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) received in total funding for the 2024-25 fiscal year, and it’s been seriously underfunded for a long time.
I can see both sides.
A fundamental question is what universal high frequency (daily?) delivery to every service address in a far-flung nation has to cost, even if delivered with the utmost of current tech, enthusiasm, efficiency, and management wisdom.
If that number is e.g $50 per day per delivery address, then the mission is unaffordable and needs to be trimmed.
“Should cost” budgeting is a risky business full of pitfalls, but for rational decisions to happen there has to be an awareness of the true costs that can’t be handwaved away.
Maybe the answer is to-the-door delivery is weekly in high density areas and never in low density areas. Maybe the answer is zero tax funding and postage is $12 for ordinary correspondence. Maybe bulk mail should simply be banned. Or their discounted (subsidized?) price tier removed so it too costs $12 per piece.
I know I don’t know the answer. But rational decisions start with a rational understanding of the inescapable logistical facts on the ground. Which does not seem to be much in evidence on either side of our common border.
Huh, i read that as “post cards”, but i see you are probably right.
My parents told me about it back in the 1980s, but they never explained the why.
I just found this answer on Quora (paywalled). Paraphrasing: This was called “third-class mail”, apparently it was used for Christmas cards having no personal message. The envelope had to remain unsealed because the post office was allowed to check that there was no personal message. So it was not “cheap because unsealed”, but “unsealed because we reserve the right to check if it deserves the cheap rate”.
My understanding is that third-class mail was meant for mass mailings, say a furniture store sending an identical advertising letter to the whole town, or my parents sending identical letters to all parishioners. Christmas cards qualified too if they were impersonal enough to qualify as a mass mailing.
That’s logical. Kinda unexpected, but makes complete sense. I can sure see that as a sop to the constituents: “Hey everybody, half off pricing when mailing Christmas cards! No more paying more than bulk mailers do when sending your own bulk mailings.”
Thank you!
The issue of CUPW’S militancy is a complicated one, but recall the old saying: “the best union organizer is a lousy employer.” Canada Post went from being a dispenser of patronage jobs in the 19th and early 20th centuries to an employer as welfare scheme, hiring disabled vets, for example, and treating such positions as more or less charity. That attitude continued for a long time, meaning postal workers and indeed the civil service more generally, was badly paid and had no means of redress, as unionization and strikes were illegal. That never ends strikes. It just means there will be–and there were–illegal strikes in the 1960s, as indeed there was a rise in all strikes and illegal strikes in every sector in that period. Now throw in the huge costs of new technology in the 1960s and 1970s, and we started to see the debt beginning to accumulate. The new technologies, from mail sorting to computerized route planning to job surveillance and more, was a huge speed-up and intensification of the work process. At the same time, the government reduced the right effective right to bargain and strike and hardballed grievance procedures.
At this point, the neo-liberal counter-revolution was cranking up and it became popular to blame unions and government and government unions for the creaking and straining in the economy. A lot of unions just retreated. CUPW remained defiant and is still paying the price for that.
This is an interesting idea, but at that price no one would send anything and then the price would have to go up further. And really this is the core ‘issue’ – the demand for letter delivery is very, very soft. It is continuously decaying and new barriers or costs will just accelerate the decline.
I agree the post office shouldn’t have to be profitable any more than other government services. But privatization can take multiple forms. For the current USPS, using bulk mail to pay for operations is a form of privatization.
There is a lot of value in last-mile delivery for critical letters, but not every day. It’s an odd system to fill everyone’s mailbox daily with actual garbage just to pay for the annual social security mailing. (It’s an exaggeration of course and I suspect @puzzlegal isn’t the only one that finds value in the bulk mail).
I get this really cute art thing in the mail, using an envelope. This person in Canada just wanted a way to send out physical art and to make it economical while cheap, they have to use small envelopes.
Similarly my bay leaves from someone here came in an envelope. And the coupons I get every Wednesday are often useful.
The only other thing of interest are the weird ld things thatvget sent to the old ownersz who get MAGA adjacent ads, while we never do
My local water bill comes via mail every month. There is no online presence as of yet although it is said to be in the works.
So I write out a check and take it to the borough drop off location.
6 times a year I get a quasi lottery mailing (fundraising activity) from the local Fire Department with a ticket and an envelope to send in my ten dollar donation. I could drop it off but I mail it in.
I have no idea idea how mailbox locations could be set up in a small town like mine without significant inconvenience or trying to buy property from homeowners at the end of each block. I don’t even think that could work as many properties are fenced in and or inconveniently located.
Going to the post office is difficult as there are so many steps to get up to the building in the town where I work. If I want to buy stamps and can’t make the steps I have to call them and they will come out to the car. There is no disability access available.
You can buy stamps online and they’ll mail them to you. There’s an annoying $2 handling fee. I think a lot of grocery stores will have stamps in the till.
I have ordered online before but sometimes need to do other stuff at the post office like mail things certified. As long as I go to the post office in my small town and not the town where I work it’s OK (for now).
I think one of the grocery stores about 20 minutes away might still sell stamps but it’s been years since I tried that. Forgot about that!
Thanks for the reminder.
I enjoy writing and receiving physical letters. Judging by the large card sections at my local bookstores, I’m not alone. My friends and I also send postcards when we travel.
We just received our first holiday card and are about to send around 25-30 out.
A significant percent of those cards aren’t mailed. I’d guess a majority are brought and handed to the person at birthday, retirement and holiday parties. Wedding invitations and save the date cards still seem to be mailed though as well as graduation announcements.