The stamp goes to 82 cents on Sunday. Sixty percent of what lands in your mailbox came from an advertiser paying far less than you.
The U.S. Postal Service on Sunday will raise the price of a first-class Forever stamp from 78 cents to 82 cents. The extra four cents come out of the pocket of whoever still writes letters. The direct mail industry will barely notice. It pays a bulk rate the rest of us have never been offered, on the theory that its volume keeps the delivery network alive, when its volume is what the network is dying of. In 2024, it sent the average American household 410 pieces of advertising, compared with 97 pieces of correspondence of any kind.
Rewind to March 17. Postmaster General David Steiner, the executive who runs the Postal Service, told a House Oversight subcommittee that the agency would be out of cash in less than twelve months. He asked Congress to lift a borrowing cap that has not moved since 1992. He told lawmakers that a stamp priced at 90 to 95 cents “would largely solve our controllable loss.” Twenty-three days later, the Postal Service filed for four cents. On May 27, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that must approve postal rates, signed off. The new rates take effect on Sunday, July 12.
Steiner’s deadline has since moved. In late June, he told a Senate committee that a pause on required retirement payments had pushed the projected cash crisis out to somewhere between 2031 and 2034. The pause buys years. It changes nothing about the arithmetic that produced the emergency, and neither does Sunday’s four cents.
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