As I’ve mentioned before I haven’t quite gotten the knack of bundling up our little baby boy and carting him off to wherever I need to go. According to the pediatrician I really shouldn’t be dragging him out and about anyway, so I’ve been doing my best to spend time in and around our home.
Thankfully the Internet makes this task easier than ever. I can order my groceries online along with any other household necessities. Amazon and Peapod have been able to provide us with just about anything we couldn’t otherwise live without.
Two weeks ago I used a free coupon code to order birth announcements from Shutterfly. I thought about shipping them directly from the website, but I wanted to personalize the cards and add thank you notes to some of them, so I had them shipped to my home first.
As soon as they arrived I added my personalized notes, addressed them and stacked them on the table to be shipped. I just needed one last thing… stamps. Unfortunately, we didn’t have quite enough stamps to ship all of the cards out, so I went online to USPS and ordered some more.
I figured the post office would send the stamps out right away and that within a day or two I’d be able to adhere them to my envelopes and send the mail on its way. I could not have been more wrong.
I ordered three books of forever stamps over seven days ago. Each day I waited for the mail to come and was disappointed to find that the stamps still hadn’t arrived. I looked up the status on the USPS website, but my order was labeled “in process.” I didn’t know if “in process” meant my order was being packaged or if it actually shipped, so after waiting for seven days for them to arrive I gave up, bundled our little one up and drove to the local post office.
When I arrived I dragged the baby out of the car, along with my cards and the diaper bag and everything else under the sun and saw a sign on the door that read hours of operation 11:00 – 4:00. I arrived at 1:15 so I breathed a big sigh of relief. It was short lived. It turns out that this particular postal store is closed from 1:00 to 2:00 for lunch.
So I pack the baby and all my junk back into the car and drive down to the next nearest post office. There I waited in line and finally ordered and paid for three books of stamps.
Buying stamps just shouldn’t be so difficult. The mailman comes to my house six days a week, so why on earth did it take over seven days to receive a book of stamps? Argh!
Not sure if this is still the case, but when I was a kid I used to leave an envelope in the mailbox with money for a book of stamps, and my mailman would leave the stamps in the mailbox.
Things have definitely changed with the post office. My current mailman will do ANYTHING to avoid getting out of his car when I get a package, from tossing the package in my yard to cramming it in the mailbox. One day I pulled the mailbox, post and all, out of the ground trying to remove a package that was clearly too big to fit. He is also too lazy to close the mailbox door, so sometimes my mail gets blown out into the ditch or the road.
Personally, I would be okay with getting mail once or twice a week. Route all packages to UPS or FedEx and let the mailman show up occasionally with my junk mail. Because that's all I get these days.
Personally, I love going out to get the mail each day! We hardly ever have boring mail days…we receive magazines, letters, postcards, freebies, packages, and the like. I would be devastated if the postal service seriously cut down on their services/deliveries.
HOWEVER. Sometimes, they stink. (Like your experience with the stamps). We're lucky to have a great mail carrier now, but for several years we had mail carriers who would clearly just take days off (when nobody on the street got mail, etc). And a couple years ago, we lived in a house that had been converted into two apartments. For some reason, all of the mail carriers were either too lazy or dumb or both to locate our actual mailbox, which wasn't hard to find. They habitually left mail in the doors of the upper apartment, on side stoops where they got rained on, etc. AGH!
Most major grocery stores sell postage.
I know drugstore pharmacies like CVS and Rite Aid sell stamps.
I can buy stamps at my bank's ATM.
We are able to leave an envelope with money in it for a book of stamps, and our mail carrier will leave stamps in our box. You can also buy them at the grocery store if that is more convenient.
I do what one of your readers say. I leave a envelope in the mail box with a check for the amount of stamps I want. I get stamps the next day or sometimes the same day.
I've never heard of leaving the money in the mailbox. I plan to ask my mail carrier about that tomorrow.
I decided to go to the post office, because I wanted to ship the letters out as soon as I applied the postage. Otherwise I definitely would've gone to the grocery store or any place other than the post office. Of course, if leaving money in the mailbox works then I'll use that trick from now on!
Recently I visited the local P.O. in an attempt to buy 29 cent stamps for postcards. I requested 20, but in the entire building, they could only find four! Almost comical watching the guy wander about and root through various drawers. Mostly sad, though.