Rant #1,976: The Letter

Everything is going up, from gas to groceries, now that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have entered our lives.

Heck, why not have another complication added to that?

The Postal Service is reportedly planning to raise all rates in January, and reports are that the USPS is also hoping to get the power to put in place larger rate hikes.

To open 2018, on January 21, the USPS will reportedly raise the rate for First Class mail--which is limited by an inflation-based cap--by about 2 percent. This raise means the Forever Stamp will cost 50 cents.

What they refer to as "competitive" mail--such as Priority Mail--is set to rise from 1 percent to 3 percent.

Sure, for most of us, the rise will be just a penny for the majority of mail that we use, and a book of 10 stamps will cost 10 cents more, but at this point, I don't think that what many would look at as a minuscule raise in price is really the point of this whole exercise.

We are paying more for everything, and the Post Office--with email and social media like Facebook becoming just about commonplace today--is really running against a brick wall in its attempt to remain the most dominant mail system in 2017, 2018 and into the future.

I personally love to receive actual mail, but most people have cut into their mail receiving and sending out by turning to online payment for their bills.

Personally, I don't trust that as a way to pay my own bills, but think about it--it means one less piece of mail coming to you, and one less piece of mail going out.

Whenever such a situation is handled this way, the Post Office loses about 75 cents to a dollar, depending on how much the mail you get costs the sender to get to you.

And you pay 49 cents, and soon 50 cents, to send your payment in.

Do it online, and the Post Office gets nothing.

As probably millions of people are handling their bills this way, they have to continually make up for this, and an extra penny per letter will help them do it.

And that is not even counting the fact that a lot of people either do not use the mail at all anymore for any correspondence or have cut down its use considerably.

Email is not perfect, but it is certainly a cheaper way to communicate, as is paying electronically. And social media gets the job done in an even more immediate way.

I have no personal beef with the Post Office. My grandfather worked for them for years as a postal inspector, and my grandmother lived off his pension for years.

My grandfather had a regular job to go to in the Depression, and that alone makes me proud that he worked for the USPS.

But times have changed, and the Post Office as we know it has not kept up with such changes.

The only way they can make up for it is to get its users to shell out a little more to send their mail out the old fashioned, snail-mail way.

With everything else going up, a penny isn't that bad, even though a penny is a penny, and all the pennies mailing a letter has gone up in my lifetime--I remember it being 5 cents, I do believe--does add up over time.

I remember when I was about seven or eight, I wrote a letter to every comic book title that I liked, and I must have sent out about 50 letters at once when I did this, and the $2.50 or so that I must have spent (I don't remember how much it was in 1965, but I will bet that it was still 5 cents a stamp) must have cut into my allowance quite a bit.

But I don't think eight year olds in 2017 are even bothering to do this, because when you have email, you can send out to hundreds of correspondences, and it does not cost you a thing.

Heck, I electronically send out my resume to potential employers; the day of mailing your cover letter and resume to an employer is pretty much over, although some potential employers do insist upon using snail mail to get this information to them.

I guess they can weed out those who really want the job by those who actually send them their resume in the old fashioned mail.

I don't know, but I do know that while I have saved plenty by electronically contacting potential employers, to me, there is nothing like getting a real letter in the mail, because it really shows that the other side cares about what they are sending to you.

Those days are pretty much over, but being old fashioned, to me at least, there is no better communication than a letter, but honestly, there is no easier way to accomplish the goal than by sending your communication electronically, and that is what the norm is today anyway.

But I guess right now at least I can afford an extra penny for my mail.

Heck, the last box of business envelopes I bought, half the envelopes that were inside were already sealed shut, obviously affected by the outside weather that they were shipped in.

I do believe in omens, and maybe those envelopes being sealed shut were actually more than an inconvenience to me ... they were a message?