The price to ship your letters and packages is going up in the new year.
Starting Jan. 21, 2024, the price for a First-Class Forever U.S. Postage Stamp will increase from 66 cents to 68 cents, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
The prices for domestic postcard stamps will also increase by two cents from 51 cents to 53 cents and international postcards will increase from $1.50 to $1.55.
In addition to stamp prices increasing, the price to send priority mail and other postal services will also increase on Jan. 21.
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The Postal Service says its prices “remain among the most affordable in the world” and would “offer a great value in shipping.”
That’s a really good point. I can only imagine what it would cost if it was a private company. At least 1$ for continental and probably 2$ for “those other places”.
The prices you’re paying for private shipping today are much lower because of competition from USPS.
It would be much pricier for any carrier service without USPS pressure.
I was thinking about that. Because that’s absolutely true. Are there any countries where the postal service is not provided by the government? I wonder what a real world example would be like.
The bigger issue is how many rural areas would simply not be served by these services because it wouldn’t be profitable to do so.
That’s the real reason keeping the USPS is so imperative. In the hands of private equity, a concerning number of communities would simply not have a viable solution for non-commercial shipping.
A lot of European countries don’t have a government post system. Germany privatized theirs in 1995, probably due to an EU directive requiring member states to “fully open the postal sector to competition”. Some other countries did the same. But I think every country is served by some postal system; I wasn’t able to find anyone saying any country had none at all (except South Sudan for a brief time, but that’s to be expected and has since changed).