hydrangea blossoming

hydrangea blossoming
Hydrangea on the Edge of Blooming

Saturday, July 27, 2013

You Live, You Learn: Postoffice Edition

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the local post office (a generally wonderful place except for the frequent lines) to obtain some Mark Twain stamps.  My son had noted they were available as 'forever' stamps and suggested that we all should buy a lifetime supply and give up on the flags and like that.

I'm good with that conclusion, so I was saddened (mildly) to find that they have no Mark Twain stamps here and they can't order them for me and they're not going to get them unless by chance some get sent to them.  Nowadays, they say, they get the stamps they get.  Well, maybe things work differently in the Big City, but I live here.  So I inquired whether I could buy them on line.  'Yes,' they said, 'that is what I am suggesting to you.'  And so I did.

On line there are many stamps other than and additionally to the Mark Twain stamps so I found myself buying less than a lifetime supply of Twain and dabbling in 'Modern Art in America, 1913-1931' and 'Miles Davis and Edith Piaf' (separate stamps, not together again).  And I end up buying about $25 worth of stamps, which is probably less than a lifetime's worth, but you never can tell.  And then, alas, there is a charge for mailing them to me.

Now is seems to me that since they won't let me get them at my local post office, they might reasonably swallow the mailing costs since they own the mail.  But their financial situation is strained at this time, I know.  So I cut them some slack.

When the stamps arrive, they arrive by priority mail, in a large (12x14") white plastic envelope.  When I open the envelope, each of my three kinds of stamps is separately packaged in a glassene envelope with a sturdy cardboard backing.  Each stamp is in a different-sized package.  It seems a lot of packaging to buy $25 worth of stamps when I could just buy the flag ones or whatever else they are warehousing at the local postoffice.  And the packaging probably costs more than the handling and shipping charges I paid.  Just one more piece of a changed world that I find myself not too crazy about.  I doubt if I'll bother with buying stamps on line in the future.

I'll just have to remember and honor Mark Twain by re-reading his books, I guess.  But I was doing that anyway.

1 comment:

Aodhnait said...

The packaging sounds like it is designed to protect the stamps for collection rather than use. Perhaps this is why they were sent like this?

I'd love to see pics of the stamps you bought.