Some new rates are in place at the Post Office... and they've gone up!

Fox's Eben Brown reports rates are going up including postage stamps

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know, the mental anguish that I am dealing with
right now, just the fact that I remember going to
the post office and buying a thirteen cent stamp and
it makes me feel old, and that's bad for me.
I'm going to sue. There's got to be a lawyer
that'll do it. Evan Brown from NBC standing by guard neck.
I man hit my microphone trying to tell I haven't

(00:20):
Brown standing by right now the idea of another post
didn't we just have a stamp increase, Evan, like fifteen
minutes ago.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Not that quickly, but there was one and there's going
to be more. Actually, this is part of a plan
to raise the price of postage every six months over
the next couple of years to make up falling revenues
at the you know, at the postal service. So starting
today or technically yesterday, the price of first class postage

(00:52):
has gone up from seventy three cents to seventy eight cents,
So that's a nickel. Other things are also going up
and nickel, like international postcards, for instance, a bus sixty
five to a buck seventy. But for sending parcels boxes
that price increase is per units per rounds per pound whatever,

(01:17):
So that leads to a larger, you know, overall increase
in how much it might cost you to send something.
So that might be of interest to businesses that have
to ship boxes that base their business costs on sending
you know, the same sized box many times, right, or
for let's say nonprofits that might also have to be

(01:37):
shipping things. This does eat into the cost there. So
it does make things more expensive, but it's you know,
kind of part of the reality of the postal service,
which has pension obligations to meet at a time where
we use physical mail less and less, we send things electronically,
we pay things electronically, now you know, send important documents electronically,

(02:02):
so you know, the post office isn't getting the business
it once got. It has increased competition from private carriers,
let's say UPS or FedEx. And then one of the
largest users of a system that sends physical things, that
would be Amazon, now is doing a lot of its

(02:23):
own delivery, especially if to customers living within a certain
radius of their distribution centers, and pretty soon they'll start
doing that via drone delivery too. So there's just been
a whole dynamic change kind of at the wrong time
for the Postal Service, and their revenues have dropped off
significantly over the past twenty years, and so this is

(02:46):
part of a plan to try to raise some of
the revenue back up, to try to continue doing what
they've always done, and that is to deliver the mail,
which is you know, our postal service is still the
envy of the world. It's the other country. It's kind
of a crapshoot when you send something through the mail joining.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Us right now, Fox News reporter Evan Brown and Evan
my whole life, and I mean this in all practical ways,
my whole life. I've been hearing the post offices losing money.
Got a post officer? Have they figured out yet where
they're losing money and how to fix that? I mean,
I understand the increased competition ups, FedEx, Amazon doing their

(03:24):
own thing, and the potential drone delivery and things like that,
But this has been going on in my entire adult life.
What is there an auditing mechanism? How does the post
office get managed?

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Well? It managed vis a vis the Postmaster General. It's
a private company. That's that's uh, how do I refer
it's it's a company, It's a corporation that's owned by
the federal government, therefore owned by us, the taxpayers, and
it uh, think of it, Let's put it this way, Uh,

(03:56):
Legacy airlines had a lot of trouble competing with startups
twenty years ago, the Jet Blues and the Southwest and
the whatevers, because they didn't have those startups didn't have
the pension obligations that the legacy airlines had to meet, right,
And so the post Office now is dealing with a

(04:18):
lot of pension obligations at the same time where the
cost of doing business is higher, whether it's fuel or
supplies or you know, the wages that they have to
pay to keep up with inflation and everything else. And
they're facing increased competition from private carriers or just the

(04:39):
fact that we communicate so much more digitally now. So
it's just sort of been a perfect storm, and that
is just compounded over decades, and so it does lead
them to, you know, with a need to raise prices,
but they certainly can't raise them what they need to
raise them all at once because it would be invoitive.

(05:00):
People simply wouldn't use the postal service. Uh, And so
they do it over time and like I said, they
will be doing it every six months for the next
few years. They'll have a slight price increase, you know.
I guess the the the payoff for consumers is the
forever stamp that they now sell and have been selling
for a long time. If you bought a stamp way

(05:22):
back when the price has gone up and you don't
have to pay for the difference, yeah, still worth. Back
in the day, you would have to go out and buy,
you know, a four cent stamp and book a four
with your your the other stamps that you bought to
make up the postage rate that increased. You don't have
to do that now, So you could consider forever stamps

(05:42):
to be an inflation proof investment.