Forevers, as you likely know, have been around since 2007, when the post office began offering them instead of traditional first-class mail stamps that have denominations printed on them. A Forever lets you mail anything up to one ounce, regardless of when you purchased the stamp, what it cost you, and what the current first-class rate is.
This lets the post office raise rates frequently with little or no public feedback. And it also eliminates the need to buy small-denomination stamps every time the rates go up or to waste money by using two pre-rate-hike stamps.
In the 17 years that Forevers have been around, their price has risen 78%, with only one brief drop in 2016. That was when a special surcharge to help the post office recover from a decline in mail volume during the Great Recession of 2008-09 expired.
The numbers—which the post office has confirmed—show that for the four years ended in 2023, first class stamp volume dropped by 22.4%, compared with a drop of only 8.6% for the rest of first-class mail, which I’m calling metered first-class.
