Plan ahead for postage increase
Those of us who operate a business, whether real estate or otherwise, understand that sometimes things don't go well. The Amazons and Netflixes and others like them have distressed many brick and mortar businesses that attempted to compete with them. Some survived and some did not. Anyone who has been in business for more than a few days understands that competition is nothing to be ignored. Well, everyone but businesses connected with the government.
The US postal service has for decades competed with United Parcel Service in the package delivery business. For most of those decades, UPS has been profitable and the USPS has not. Now there are more players in the same area including FedEx and others. They all tend to be profitable while USPS operates at a loss.
The internet and the emergence of email and electronic bill receiving and payment have further depleted the USPS revenue. It also seems that technology improvements have not increased reliability or decreased the amount of elapsed time between mailing a letter and receiving what has been mailed. In short, the USPS has taken on competition by doing nothing or worse.
Faced with huge losses, USPS has once again demonstrated their lack of business acumen by doing what they always do. They are raising their prices. If your competition is providing better and more reliable service, and they are charging less, dive head first into the shallow end of the pool. Raise your already too high prices.
On January 22, the postal service will raise the price of mailing a first class letter by one cent. If you do a lot of mailing, this may be a good time to pay the postal service ahead by buying some of their forever stamps before the rate increase. If you are looking for some additional end of 2011 expenses, buy next year's stamps before the end of the year.
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