From 1932 until 1958, the price of a first-class stamp didn’t budge. For those 26 years, it was stuck at 3 cents. When it finally went up to 4 cents in ’58, it was major news.
When and if a stamp hits 50 cents, no one is really going to have to ask why. There are fixed costs to operating the Postal Service, many of them tied to labor, and the funds to support those costs are rapidly drying up in the age of e-mail. In the most recent fiscal quarter, the Postal Service lost $3.3 billion. In that same quarter, the volume of mail sent was down 6 percent from the previous year. Over the holidays, the Greeting Card Association reported, 1.5 billion holiday cards, the kind people mail to each other, were sold — down from 2.7 billion as recently as 1995.
But knowing the reasons the Postal Service needs more money does not erase the fact that the 50-cent stamp, like the $5 gallon of gas, takes us to a place we seldom considered we’d be.
And it doesn’t feel like this is the finish line. People get used to anything — take a look at the price of a cocktail in a big-city restaurant, or a ticket to a major-league baseball game. Outlandish turns into commonplace.