captpackrat | My two cents on stamps

The US Postal Service recently increased postage rates from 37 cents to 39. They did this with apparently little fanfare. I knew the change was coming "in early 2006", but I never heard any announcement about a specific date, not even at the post office itself! Apparently it was a couple weeks ago, and I'd mailed out several bills since then, all with 37 cent stamps. They haven't been returned, though, and it appears the checks have been cashed, so I can only assume they have some kind of grace period.

I have an entire roll of one hundred 37 cent stamps. So, I've been trying to buy one hundred 2 cent stamps. But the post office has been completely out of 2 cent stamps every time I've gone in there. How could they run out? Certainly they should have known they'd need a buttload of "upgrade" stamps.

Saturday I thought I'd just buy two hundred 1 cent stamps, but the line at the post office was out the door, which means a wait of at least 40 minutes, something you normally only see at Christmas or Tax time. No way in hell I'm waiting that long to buy $2 worth of stamps. I'll make due with the stamps I have, even if I have to get creative like using tons of 5 and 1 cent stamps

Has the US Postal Service grown that utterly incompetent that they completely flubbed the price hike? Or is this deliberate, in an attempt to get people to use more postage than necessary? Maybe they're hoping people will use 3 cent stamps leftover from the last postage hike, thus giving them an extra penny? One penny times millions of letters is a lot of money. The only place that seems to have the stamps is the USPS web site, and they charge "shipping and handling". Why is the Postal Service charging for shipping on their own products?

They say, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity", but I think there is a corollary to that, "Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by greed."