hello all.
i (thank the heavens) don’t receive much junk mail. but my workplace does, and i’m the mail guy, so i see all of it.
my question is this- by approximately how much money would stamps go up in price if junk mail were eliminated? it seems like shitters of junk mail is one of the few things keeping our postage so low.
jb
Well, stamps have gone up many times in the past few decades and the volume of junk mail doesn’t seem to have changed.
I believe it can be as cheap as 22 cents (such as for non-profits) to mail letters in the US if you buy a bulk permit.
I think what jb_farley is asking is how much does junk mail subsidize everyone else’s postage rates? (i.e., how much more expensive would a first class stamp be without all the junk mail in the Postal System?). This is a good question, for which I’m curious to see an answer.
I believe that each segment of the postal service (Express Mail, First Class, bulk mail, etc.) is required by law to pay its own way, so that one segment does not offset the costs of another. In that case, the answer to your question would be “approximately none.” However, even if this is the case, a large volume of junk mail would introduce economies of scale that would benifit all the mail (i.e., automation and huge sorting systems) even if no money is transferred.
I will look for a cite…
I found this cite. Here’s a quotation from the 4th paragraph:
Here’s the USPS revenue reports page. It looks like for the 2002 fiscal year, there was $16 billion in revenues from standard mail, vs. $36 billion in revenues from first-class mail. $21 billion of that first-class mail was people just sticking stamps on an evelope – the rest is presorted business mail.
Not quite an answer to the question, but some numbers to use as a starting point. For instance, if first-class had to make up all the revenue from standard mail disappearing, a stamp would go from $0.38 to $0.54 (in the roughest estimation ever).
J.B. Farley, eh?
Well, if J.A. Farley (FDR’s Postmaster General) was your dad you should be ashamed at yourself for asking this question!
[Grinny here.]