This is the pricing from the USPS website. it is still a good deal, but they jacked the rates almost 50% from a montha ago.
Posted on 01/30/2013 11:42:46 AM PST by pabianice
The bankrupt USPS's business plan includes making business more difficult.
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So today I went to my local post office to buy stamps. I gave the clerk my credit card, which I have “signed” with “See Picture ID.” No doing. You see, the Postal Service has decided that they will not accept credit cards asking for your driver’s license or Military ID or Police ID. No. The Postmaster has decided that this is “too risky.” Rather, your credit card has to be signed with your name for them to accept it. Because you may be using the photo ID of someone who is your double while you are up to no good buying envelopes. Or something.
Your Federal Government at work – making your life more difficult.
I’ve been sending stuff to Germany and Afghanistan to my daugther and son in law. Package pricing is rarely above 15 dollars and I use priority mail, often the flat rates. I wonder why yours is so much. My stuff before Christmas got to AFG in under two weeks.
I have always been able to buy individual stamps before. I have bought 1 and 2 cent stamps before, when needed.
I swipe my card...at the counter. They never look at my card.
I give them the last 4 digits of the card...and that's it.
I don't work for them...and don't like many things about them. But...I've had very little problems with them. In fact personally I give them praise....for the service they give me.
They wouldn’t sell the individual stamps. They said I had to buy a whole book at a time.
The only stamps they can tear off and sell individually are the ones you have to lick to stick. They can't break apart packs of the self-adhesive stamps. If you didn't need Christmas stamps they could have sold you individual stamps.
Over the past thirty years I’ve dealt with 2 different POs. Night and Day. One was openly hostile and bullied customers. I had a mailman not deliver a check for two months after I sent it. I had to send a second check which got there before the first one. After the mailman got fired, they found undelivered mail in the area. The second PO has been good to me.
Were you sending it directly to Germany and Afghanistan or to an APO/FPO address here in the states? If you sent it APO or FPO then the military handles it rather than the post office shipping it overseas and putting it into the local mail system.
A signed credit card makes it so much easier for an ID thief to clone your signature on other documents as he applies for more credit.
20 + year veteran investigating fraud
But a larger town is 30 miles from me...and they are generally flat to rude.
FWIW-
All of us aging white dudes look alike, anyway! < /sarc >
This is the pricing from the USPS website. it is still a good deal, but they jacked the rates almost 50% from a montha ago.
There are usually 5 to 12 people directly involved in this since more means you lengthen your chains of communication making the job longer!
In the good old days we didn't have electronic memory available to help us ~ now they have plenty of it to get in the way!
Then you stay awake most of the 10 days ~ and you get the revised rules published in the Federal Register (which is a separate task and that starts about 4 days from the end of the 10 day period of performance).
Looking at this they've gone into the on-line version of the rules and cranked in the rates under the EXISTING structure. That will change in a week or so after a totally new website is rebuilt ~ with a vast amount of proofreading by the world's foremost experts in postal rules.
So, thank goodness I am retired now ~ I think I went through this nearly a dozen times over the years ~ and once it's done you have piddling little edit corrections over the next 6 months ~ as people read your stuff and figure out everything wrong you did.
Top level Postal management thinks this is far simpler than it is and give no extra credit for it ~ which is why they usually burn out a rule writer in less than 5 years.
This is why I know what happened to Tony Weiner ~ he burned out then flipped out and then started sending e-mails of his packages!
It can happen.
In effect our GI Joes and Janes get a taxpayer subsidized delivery service ~ but you pay the average freight to the office inside the USA which transfers that mail to the custody of the military!
BTW, just because you can associate an APO number with a foreign city or area or an FPO with a ship, that doesn't mean the individual is even there. A common military practice is to give you an APO number that has nothing to do with your location. Then, unbeknownst to anybody in USPS, or with the mailers, or you, or them, arrange to transfer that mail to the right place ~ which keeps specific assignments almost secret.
I think you would have to be a sadist to go to the post office. On rare occasions when I must go there I experience something even rarer...sympathy for government union workers. Never more than one clerk on duty while the line stretches out the door and halfway to Toledo. Can’t figure out how she’s supposed to take a bathroom break, while many in line start to get awfully grumpy.
I’ve noticed it doesn’t matter if there is a line around the block or not. When the feed bell or break comes they
just lock the drawer and walk away.
Your last sentence=VERY FUNNY! LOL
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