Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - 6:33 AM

Forever Stamp Price Going Up - Should It Go Up By More?

The cost of a first-class stamp — also known as a forever stamp — will rise to 45 cents on Jan. 22, the first price increase in more than 2 1/2 years, the USPS said.

This 1-cent increase is a 2.27% increase. It should be pointed out that other postal rates are going up more. Some of the increases include postcards up 3 cents to 32 cents (10.34% increase) and letters to Canada and Mexico up 5 cents to 85 cents (6.25% increase).

The concern about forever stamps is that the USPS is gaming the system by increasing rates on other classes of mail more than on forever stamps. In this way the forever feature becomes less useful. me1004 has a good review of this issue in this forum thread.

KenBDG5,146 posts since
Nov 29, 2009
Rep Points: 117,024

1. Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - 10:50 AM

This is kind of alarming -- because they were supposed to only raise prices once a year, in May, and that based on the inflation rate. They just raised the prices last May -- and now they are doing it again in January! How did this come about? Will they raise prices again in May?

This means they are taking far more than the rate of inflation for postal price increases this year!

me1004293 posts since
Jan 16, 2010
Rep Points: 1,862