Postage price increase

Time to grumble and gripe about the rising cost of postage; to threaten to do everything over the Internet, no matter what the connection fee. Why? Because, over the weekend, the price of a first class stamp jumped from 34 to 37 cents. My daughter, busy writing thank you notes for the wedding gifts she received, barely blinked. What was three cents more compared to the time and money the givers spent?
I stopped by the post office for 37-cent stamps and a few 3 cent stamps to add the old 34-cent stamps we still had.
As I purchased my stamps, I commented to the clerk that the cost of a candy bar has stayed a few cents above the cost of a stamp. The difference is – the manufacturers of candy have not only raised the cost of the candy bar, they have also decreased the size of the candy bar while the post office continues to deliver letters to every Podunk community in the U.S. of A including Alaska and Hawaii.
The first stamp increase I remember was in 1968 – the year my family moved a couple thousand miles away from the green hills of New York to Podunk. We wrote a lot of letters after we moved, but in December my mom began crossing names off her Christmas greeting card list because it cost too much to continue to send cards. A lot of other people decided the same thing. We went from having enough cards to paper a wall, to barely a handful.
The next increase I remember came after my husband and I bought our house. At first the bank acknowledged each mortgage payment we mailed in with a self-addressed stamped envelope for the next payment. By the time the price of stamps had stair-stepped up to 13 cents in 1977, the bank had discontinued the practice as too costly.
With spiraling inflation, the real question is how much has the price of a first class stamp gone up compared to say, the cost of a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk, gallon of gas, buying a house, or an hour’s worth of work at the minimum wage? I found some interesting statistical answers on the Internet at www.dol.gov/esa/minwage and 1960sFlashback.com.
The year I was old enough to enter the work force with my first job at minimum wages, without paying any taxes, I could purchase 27 stamps, three dozen eggs, five quarts of milk or about five gallons of gas. The average home sold in America would have required saving up my wages from 18,000 hours of work at minimum wage.
By the time I married, an hour of minimum wage labor bought about 20 stamps, three dozen eggs, the same five quarts of milk and about four gallons of gas. The cost of a typical house had not significantly increased.
The gas embargoes of the 70’s really put a pinch on our budget before my last child was born. By that time an hour of minimum wage labor purchased three and a half dozen eggs, six quarts of milk, 17 or 18 stamps, or a mere 2.5 gallons of gas. The average home had escalated to 25,000 hours of work at minimum pay.
After oldest child graduated from high school, he discovered that one hour of minimum wage work would almost purchase 15 stamps, three and a half dozen eggs, about two gallons of milk or three and a half gallons of gas. However, the average home price required 34,600 hours of work at minimum wage salary.
When my last child graduated from high school, one hour of minimum wage labor bought the same 15 stamps, four gallons of gas, almost five dozen eggs or about a six quarts of milk. But she would have had to save the equivalent of 38,000 plus hours of minimum wages to get the house.
This year at minimum wages for same hour’s worth of work, she and her husband will be able to buy twice as many eggs and a quart more of milk than her dad and I could when we married. However, they will work an extra fifteen minutes to pay for the same number of stamps for thank you notes that we used after our marriage. The real sticker shock will come when they begin to look at housing: the cost of the average house has doubled in proportion to the minimum wage since my marriage 30 years ago.
So, she will pay three cents more for a stamp to send thank you notes. Writing the note took her a whole lot less time than earning the money to pay for the gift and not so very much time to pay for the stamp – not even with the price increase.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. She can be reached by e-mail at jhersh@ipa.net.)