That’s a lot of inventory to push right after a price hike.
Kind of seems to not taking into account how much it will cost to sell those stamps. Is there an easy way to sell them or are you going to have put up ads, shipping, handlers, etc for lots of small orders?
Isn’t this how Charles Ponzi got started?
“The purpose of the postal reply coupon was to allow someone in one country to send it to a correspondent in another country, who could use it to pay the postage of a reply. IRCs were priced at the cost of postage in the country of purchase, but could be exchanged for stamps to cover the cost of postage in the country where redeemed; if these values were different, there was a potential profit. Inflation after World War I had greatly decreased the cost of postage in Italy expressed in U.S. dollars, so that an IRC could be bought cheaply in Italy and exchanged for U.S. stamps of higher value, which could then be sold. Ponzi claimed that the net profit on these transactions, after expenses and exchange rates, was in excess of 400%. This was a form of arbitrage, or profiting by buying an asset at a lower price in one market and immediately selling it in a market where the price is higher, which is not illegal.”
taco, is that you?
I came here to make that same comment. I’m glad someone else thought that.
Is this strictly arbitrage? I thought it required two distinct markets.
Temporal arbitrage?
Hurray! I could not be happier that they are raising the cost of the stamp. Hell, I think they should triple the cost of a stamp. Strip them of the monopoly laws that prevent other other delivery services from getting in on their turf while we are at it. A postal service is a great thing, but that isn’t what we have. We have a junk mail delivery service that on very rare occasion delivers a piece of government issued mail. I get a demand for a local excise tax each year and maybe one or two other odds and ends in terms of government mail. The rest? A god damn mailbox full of trash. It is hilarious that I get easily get a couple orders of magnitude or more e-mail than I do snail mail, yet I get more spam in my mail box in a day, the I get in my gmail box in a month.
So Forever stamps work for first class letter postage. Users of stamps are likely to be individual mailers. So while you can purchase in million dollar lots for a $1.75 shipping fee, unless you have a huge extended family and lots of invitations, birthday cards, and thank-you notes, you are going to be stuck with a-lot of stamps. Any organization that COULD use a million stamps, will be mailing with meters, or a permit, or sending their mail through a co-mingle operation for sortation discounts.
Would you pay full price for stamps from a non-USPS organization?
Definitely not arbitrage, because the temporal component is risk by definition. You are betting that the “above inflation” price hike will actually still be above inflation by the time you are able to sell all of those stamps, which is not a particularly good bet given the logistics involved and the potential for the craziness of the US government to totally screw things up in the economy in the near future.
Stock market speculation is bad, but this is good? Profiting at the expense of a struggling USPS is good? There’s a reason they’re implementing an above-inflation price hike, and it’s not because they want even more profit; it’s because they want to lower their losses.
Their monopoly is what ensures pretty much everyone in the US, regardless of where they are located, can get mail service at a reasonable price. Remove the monopoly and deliveries within major centers will become a lot cheaper, while mail to/from rural locations will be exorbitant.
I respectfully disagree with you. My wife and I run a small business and ship all our orders by USPS. Their price is lower, their lost shipment rate is lower, their international shipping is WAY lower, and their damaged package rate is lower than either major parcel service, in our experience. The USPS employees we deal with are conscientious and friendly. Their customer support phone system is a Kafkaesque nightmare, but I haven’t had a much better experience with the other services.
From my perspective, the USPS is a wonderful gift from our government to small businesses, and I would (and will, apparently) happily pay more for the service than I currently do.
I figure that wearing a long trench coat, while simultaneously displaying an inside pocket full of stamps and going, “Psst, psst, wanna buy some stamps… cheap”, in front of the post office, sounds like a fine plan.
Those shitty donation letter pleas from The Ayn Rand Institute really have a way of clogging the old letter slot.
I’m pretty sure burritos by drone and prostitution by teledildonic sensation tokens replace the USPS and the USD, respectively, by Q2 '15. But sure, I’ll buy your trench coat stamps.
You seem to be suggesting that the reason you get no good mail is because of the USPS. And that, somehow, if FedEx were on an even footing, that you’d start receiving all sorts of nice letters and birthday presents and stuff.
I think the problem isn’t where you seem to think it is…
And all you need is $4.6 million to invest.To paraphrase Mitt Romney, if you don’t have it just borrow it from Mom and Dad.Be sure to share your other hallucinations with us.
“And I gather you are selling promissory notes, too?” “What?” “The stamps, Mr ■■■■■. A promise to carry a penny’s worth of mail. A promise that must be kept."
Those shitty donation letter pleas from The Ayn Rand Institute really have a way of clogging the old letter slot.
Yes, I clearly worship at the feet of Rand because only a capitalist dog hates getting a thousand fucking pieces of unsolicited junk mail from corporations from a government agency. A true member proletariat relishes glorious offers of 0% financing for 12 months and free HBO for six months!
I have to say, I am truly impressed with the epic case of cognitive dissonance you must be rocking to think that someone being pissed at few hundred pounds of corporate junk mail they get each year makes them some flavor of Randroid. Pssst, when a government agency is acting in the mindless interest of exceptionally shitty and obnoxious corporations, they are not actually serving the people. The piles of junk mail the average American gets each day is actually a bad thing and a pretty classic case of pissed away scarce resources.
