Monday, March 12, 2007

Stamping out the post office

What is the future of (snail) mail? I only found out today that the price of a stamp is now 55c (that's $0.72). That's amazingly expensive for mailing a letter that's going somewhere in Ireland. If you want to mail a letter to Britain or France or the US or Australia, it's 78c ($1.03).

I presume the reason the price has gone so high is that people are just not bothering to post things these days. I'd be annoyed about these rates if I posted more than a dozen letters a year. As it is, all that's really bothering me is that I have two or three books of 48c stamps and three books of 75c stamps and now I need to buy small value stamps in order to use these stamps.

I wonder how much longer we will even have a post office, at least the post office we know now. Surely home deliveries have to be phased out sooner or later. I can't understand why the Post Office hasn't already offered homeowners a financial incentive to give up home delivery in favor of a centralized mail box system at the sorting office.

I probably only receive a half dozen meaningful pieces of mail a month. Yet, the postman passes by my front door every single day. It wouldn't be too much of a burden to have to stop by the sorting office on a weekly basis to collect my mail.