Post Office
I send and receive a lot of mail since I buy and sell trading cards over the internet, and I have to say that after hundreds of transactions, I have had virtually no problems at all with the Post Office. The USPS does a great job with residential service and I just think that people take it completely for granted.
So anyway, yesterday I was at the Post Office and I asked the lady at the counter for a coil of Forever stamps. She tells me "Forever Stamps don't come in coils", which seemed strange to me since I had just pulled such a stamp from a coil not more than 15 minutes prior to mail out a card order. She was insistent, and while I knew my eyes did not deceive me, I saw no profit in arguing philately with a pro so I just asked for the equivalent number of stamps on sheets.
So today I go to Google to be proven right as usual but in a stunning turn of events, I was wrong!
I bought a roll of these:
a few years ago and the cats somehow managed to lose them behind our stove; a spring cleaning revealed the $30 or so worth of stamps that still remained on the roll. I've been using them to send regular first-class letters for some time now, and they've been delivered without any trouble according to the feedback I continue to receive for card sales.
However, according to to this chart, what I thought were forever stamps are actually nondenominated transitional first class stamps, and they're actually only worth 41 cents. I am glad they haven't all been returned to me for insufficient postage, and I wonder if there's an official policy on how long these stamps are honored for first class postage or if I've just somehow gotten lucky.
The moral of the story is that actual forever stamps that can be bought in bulk without fear of postage increases actually say the word "Forever" on them. Accept no substitutes.
So anyway, yesterday I was at the Post Office and I asked the lady at the counter for a coil of Forever stamps. She tells me "Forever Stamps don't come in coils", which seemed strange to me since I had just pulled such a stamp from a coil not more than 15 minutes prior to mail out a card order. She was insistent, and while I knew my eyes did not deceive me, I saw no profit in arguing philately with a pro so I just asked for the equivalent number of stamps on sheets.
So today I go to Google to be proven right as usual but in a stunning turn of events, I was wrong!
I bought a roll of these:
a few years ago and the cats somehow managed to lose them behind our stove; a spring cleaning revealed the $30 or so worth of stamps that still remained on the roll. I've been using them to send regular first-class letters for some time now, and they've been delivered without any trouble according to the feedback I continue to receive for card sales.
However, according to to this chart, what I thought were forever stamps are actually nondenominated transitional first class stamps, and they're actually only worth 41 cents. I am glad they haven't all been returned to me for insufficient postage, and I wonder if there's an official policy on how long these stamps are honored for first class postage or if I've just somehow gotten lucky.
The moral of the story is that actual forever stamps that can be bought in bulk without fear of postage increases actually say the word "Forever" on them. Accept no substitutes.