The price of a U.S. first-class stamp goes up January 27, 2019 from $0.50 to $0.55.
If you’re of a certain generation you might ask, “What’s a stamp?”
If you were alive 50-years-ago, when stamps were $0.06, you might grumble about the higher price.
But focusing on the price misses something bigger: the marvel of what you get for the price of that stamp; that stamp affixed to an envelope you can send to a friend 3,000 miles away.
With that stamp, a person comes to your door and personally picks up your card. Maybe it’s a card celebrating your friend’s birthday. Maybe it’s a condolence card, giving comfort for a recent loss. Maybe it’s a graduation card or a Valentine’s card or a “just because” card.
It doesn’t matter. For the price of that stamp, your card gets conveyed into a system of people and machines and trucks and planes that, within a few days, will ensure your card is delivered, in person by yet another individual, directly to your friend’s house. All for 50-cents.
That…is a marvel.
For the price of that stamp, your friend is reading words you wrote by hand, on a card you chose just for them. When they picked up their mail, there, in among bills and junk mail and circulars, they saw a hand-addressed envelope with their name on it. When they saw that envelope with its 50-cent stamp and your return address, they smiled and felt a surge of pleasure.
The stamp has a marvelous power technology and email don’t have.
While technology allows you to deliver a written message to your friend instantly, that message gets delivered to an email box that is swamped to the brim with other emails: communications from colleagues, bosses, vendors and marketers; family, friends, newsletters and spammers. Your friend is overwhelmed by their email box. They are awash in emails.
But when your hand-addressed envelope shows up in your friend’s real mailbox? Where they can retrieve it, hold it, savor it? Delivered there by a little stamp?
That is a unicorn; a rare gift.
It’s a marvel.
Postage Price Increase Information:
The price of a stamp will be $0.55 effective 1/27/19. If you’ve been planning to buy Forever stamps, now is a good time. And who will you send your next card to?