[mom4melody]

I have a sheet of 20 stamps I bought just before Christmas.

In 2010.

I still have 5 stamps left. People just don’t use stamps the way they used to.

[Vigilanteman]

People just don’t use stamps the way they used to.

And they will use them even less now. Meanwhile, post offices in other countries are run so well that:

1. Singapore and the Netherlands postal systems actually solicit mundane business such as billing and catalogs from other countries because they print and mail out things all over the continent for less money than a country in the same region can do it themselves.
   
2. The German postal system had so much extra cash, they bought DHL, the international courier service.
   
3. The Japanese postal system is so well run that they sell stamps at wholesale so places like supermarkets can resell to customers at face value and still make a profit. When mail volume gets extra heavy, they will hire responsible high school kids on bikes to make deliveries. Japan's postal service even has branches in the most remote rural region of the country which also provide banking services and earn a profit. It is modeled after the same services provided by the U.S. Postal Service from the 1880s to 1940s. Postal workers in Japan willingly concede fatter wages and pensions to the private sector in return for increase job security, just like the used to do so in the U.S.A.