Sounding Like Andy Rooney and Hating it, But

I recently discontinued my Stamps.Com subscription. It was time. And than again, it's one of those things I had to give up when I went to Mac.

Stamps.Com is a website that retails, USPS, UPS and Fedex services online. Customers can buy and print out stamps. They can calculate and print out paid shipping labels, buy supplies and customize services. It's like having a UPS or Kinko's store in your home.

I subscribed for the minimum service and it ran me about $16.00 per month. (This does not include any postage. You need to register a credit card for payment of postage.) Those months that we were shipping gifts to our relatives, doing business on E-Bay and I was sending out proposals to agents for my novel, I was glad I had the service. The months that I sent out a few bills with standard postage, I kicked myself in the backside for wasting the money.

What I always asked myself, particularly when the monthly subscription charge showed up on my credit card statement, was why didn't the USPS offer this to me and other customers. It has to be to their benefit to offer service that would lower their cost to do business.

Banks have certainly done this. ATM machines were originally suppose to be a way to give the customer 24 hour availability to their funds and eliminate the window cashier. While banks still employ window tellers, my guess is they employ a lot fewer of them than they would if the ATM machine wasn't so available. Not only have banks lowered their overhead, they've turned ATM's into reverse cash machines by charging for the service.

Of course I'm suggesting that USPS could do this at a lower rate and still make a profit since, unlike Stamps.com, they could actually show a savings on providing the service, as it would make their products more available and lower the overhead. I am not suggesting that USPS put these folks out of business. The prudent thing would be to buy them out. The question of Stamps.com employees wanting to be a part of the troubled employee base of the USPS is a whole other question.