Eames stamps

The Charles and Ray Eames stamps are available for your USPS mailing pleasure. (thx, doug)

• Charles and Ray Eames
• stamps
• USPS

The work of Charles and Ray Eames

The work of Charles and Ray Eames will be honored with a set of 16 US stamps later this year. (via chris glass)

• Charles and Ray Eames
• stamps
• USPS

USPS Undoes 200 Years of Democracy?

Interesting piece in Mother Jones about the new rate hikes for periodicals passed this year. According to the article, weekly publications like The Nation and The National Review will face up to $500,000 a year in additional delivery costs. This is the sort of small, seemingly-trivial change that makes this past week’s discussions here at kottke.org so urgent: when you look at how rapidly—and sometimes silently—things are changing, you really do need to step back sometimes and ask, “Have we really thought this through? Are we acting, and doing so urgently enough?” How significant is this rate hike? Try this:

Since the 1970s, all classes of mail have been required to cover the costs associated with their delivery, what’s called attributable cost. But periodicals, as a class, get favorable treatment: They don’t pay overhead, meaning that they don’t foot the bill for the Postal Service’s infrastructure, employees, and so on.

That’s a tradition that goes back to the origins of the nation. The founding fathers saw the press as the lifeblood of democracy—only informed voters could compose a true democracy, they believed—and thus created a postal system that gave favorable rates to small periodicals. (George Washington actually supported mailing newspapers for free.) For 200 years, small periodicals and journals of opinion were given special treatment.

• magazines
• motherjones
• USPS

Are the USPS’s “forever” stamps a good

Are the USPS’s “forever” stamps a good deal for the consumer? “Absolutely not.” Stamp prices increase more slowly than the inflation rate so stamps are continually getting cheaper.

• economics
• stamps
• USPS

The new postal price restrictions on thickness

The new postal price restrictions on thickness and whether the envelope is “flat-machinable” or not seem like the USPS passing along internal problems to their customers, the same crappy stuff that banks and the airlines do. Keep the process simple…we don’t care about your technology can and can’t do. Figure it out.

• business
• simplicity
• USPS

Shipping upgrades

This may just be the Nyquil hangover talking, but I’ve an idea. UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL should offer in-transit upgrades for package shipping[1]. I’m having something shipped and I realize that I would like it to arrive sooner than it is scheduled for. With computerized systems, they know exactly where that package is in their shipping system…it seems simple in theory to pluck it from its current route and get it going faster. The upgrade would probably come at premium price and not be a true upgrade in some cases[2], but it would be a useful (and potentially lucrative) feature.

[1] It’s possible that this is already possible. In the grand tradition of weblogs, no real research has been done.

[2] If you’re two days into waiting for a 5-7 day ground shipment from UPS and want it the next day, it may take a bit to get it from a semi in the middle of Montana onto a plane to Miami, i.e. not truly next-day.

• business
• dhl
• fedex
• ups
• USPS