Postal Rates Going Up, But Not For Basic Letters

The price of the first ounce of first class might not be changing, but the price of the second ounce is going up 17.5%!

Express Mail and  Priority mail will remain the same,but parcel post --the cheaper one -- will go up. 

They complain they have been losing because fewer and fewer people use mail. Well, hiking the price is NOT going to get them back, it will only cause even more people to find anther way! 

The inflation rate limit on price hikes applies to the overall income of the postal service, not to any specific class of mail. Thus, the more business it loses, the higher percentage price hike it can give to any class of service.

Also, what the postal service has done here is consider the Forever stamps already purchased. I'll bet most people have been stocking up on them. Thus, if the postal service were to raise the price of the first ounce, it would get nothing because the Forever stamps have already been sold. So, it leaves the price of the first ounce as-is, depriving you of any benefit of having purchased the Forever stamps! And horrendously increases the price of the second ounce, for which there are no Forever stamps! That is, it is gaming the system hoping to get more, rather then being straight forward about it.

I also note, while that article did not give the new rate for parcel post, it did say that the Priority Mail rate will remain the same. I expect that with the increase, the difference in price between the two will be nil. That again is gaming the system, pushing people into buying the pricier Priority Mail, which is delivered in two days, since there will be nearly no savings by going with Parcel Post, which takes 8 days.

I can tell you, the postal clerks at the postal stations already are clearly trained to PUSH people into the higher priced Priority Mail rather than Parcel Post rate. They will flat out not even tell you the Parcel Post rate unless you demand it strongly. And then, they will even argue with you to take the Priority Mail rate instead! I have gotten this approach at all the postal stations around me (a number of them as I'm in the heart of Los Angeles) in recent years. 

As an example, they argued with me about using Parcel Post this past Christmastime, although I was mailing more than a week and a half in advance! Of course, I noted that the difference in price even then was only about 60¢. After this rate increase, I'll bet the difference is more like 10¢.

And this is bad business. The Parcel Post rate is their only rate to compete with UPS. So, people will just use UPS instead, losing the Postal Service even more money.

yeah thats right find the prices for different weights here: postage rates