Stop me if you've heard this one before. . .

[1786davycrockett]

"U. S. Postal Service Recommends New Prices For July"

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2025/0409-usps-recommends-new-prices-for-july-2025...

Yes, indeedy, friends and neighbors -- yet another case of "insult to injury," as if we haven't received enough abuse already this year -- USPS Forever stamps to jump from 73 cents to 78 cents, and other mail services by an average of 7.4%.

It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Whether we want it or not.

[tobaccocardyahoo]

The volume of letter mail continues to decrease and as a result the cost of sending a letter increases.

Is the volume helped by continued increases, no it isn't but USPS cannot significantly reduce service to areas of the country which are unprofitable to serve so unless a direct subsidy is created and funded, every mailer of every class has to subsidize letters.

DeJoy is already gone. He tried his best and failed.

The real question to be asked "is there any business stupid enough to buy USPS?". There are some people in DC who think one exists.

This increase is not going to be affecting me in any significant way. I'll wait until there is the next parcel services increase before I vent.

[liawri-75]

I do wish that EB would cut a deal like Posh has.  Priority mail prepaid postage for $5.95 up to 5 lbs.  The customer would pay the $5.95 and that would keep us, the sellers from having "calculated rates" that buyers pay.  Just one flat fee.  Simple.

[chapeau-noir]

DeJoy is already gone. He tried his best and failed.

For whatever value of "best" is in this particular equation, though he did come up with Ground Advantage which I thought was a great idea.

[roccotacodad54]

   Yes I am 71 and have seen alot of changes and miracles.

   One thing I learned from my mother and father's recollections is how good we have it now and how weak most of us would be considered by people in the past.

   That's a cool story by the way. Before he died my dad took me to where he was born, at home (nothing but a stone foundation left) and showed me the horse drawn farm machinery still there he and my uncles worked with. They are still there rusting away to time. At one time I was going to bring them back to our land here but Antiquities Canada (?) wouldn't let me take them out of the country.

   My wife asked me "Why didn't you stay in such a beautiful place?" (I'm dual) when we visited one August. I replied that she hadn't been there in January when it's 40 below zero. One winter was enough for me. It still amazes me that without electricity and the technology available then that people did so well in such an enviroment.

   I know my age doesn't seem to match my parents being that old but they had us kids late in life and were the youngest of their respective families. They both lived to 90 and 89. I never met my grandfathers for instance and only one grandmother when I was young.

[chapeau-noir]

People adapt to conditions, though - a previous generation would really not have known anything else but their own "normal". If we had been born in that generation, would have adapted to those times and it would have been our "normal" as well, not weaker or stronger.

I recall my great grandparents and great aunts and uncles. They were a crazy bunch and used to gang around together - our family parties were something else lol.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

---

@roccotacodad54 wrote:

   Yes I am 71 and have seen alot of changes and miracles.

   One thing I learned from my mother and father's recollections is how good we have it now and how weak most of us would be considered by people in the past.

   That's a cool story by the way. Before he died my dad took me to where he was born, at home (nothing but a stone foundation left) and showed me the horse drawn farm machinery still there he and my uncles worked with. They are still there rusting away to time. At one time I was going to bring them back to our land here but Antiquities Canada (?) wouldn't let me take them out of the country.

   My wife asked me "Why didn't you stay in such a beautiful place?" (I'm dual) when we visited one August. I replied that she hadn't been there in January when it's 40 below zero. One winter was enough for me. It still amazes me that without electricity and the technology available then that people did so well in such an enviroment.

   I know my age doesn't seem to match my parents being that old but they had us kids late in life and were the youngest of their respective families. They both lived to 90 and 89. I never met my grandfathers for instance and only one grandmother when I was young.

---

My husband's only in his mid-60's but he grew up rural, in a place where 40 below is relatively common & when he was a little kid, he remembers having an outhouse!  I'm only 5 years behind him but always grew up in cities/suburbs, so that was really fascinating to me.  I was talking to a Millenial the other day & he was telling me that he believes the most important achievement of the last 100 years is Bluetooth.  I'm like, more important than commercial flight?  More important than television or a space flight?  Really?  Bluetooth? 

I guess that ages me but I've just started using Bluetooth a few months ago.  I like it, but it doesn't rank up there with commercial flight or space exploration 😀

As for USPS, they raise rates twice a year, we all know it.  We were thinking of where to retire & I'm always researching places & Colombia is a hot spot these days.  Amongst the downsides, no postal system.  Some countries apparently don't have one at all.  

[johnrj1226]

Agree with that point - only shipped by USPS when we sold on eBay - good service - only lost 2 packages out of 1665 shipped -. timely delivery services.  Buyers pay for the % increase(s) for all those sellers that use USPS on eBay and other similar sites.  Had one damaged package that was my fault. - pretty darn good batting average in my book.

Wonder how  many of the complainers received  straight A s throughout their educational years and job performance reviews.

[1786davycrockett]

@simply-the-best-for-you 

" I was talking to a Millenial the other day & he was telling me that he believes the most important achievement of the last 100 years is Bluetooth.  I'm like, more important than commercial flight?  More important than television or a space flight?  Really?  Bluetooth? "

Having spent far more time than I wish to remember shivering inside an outhouse in the 1950s, my vote would be for indoor plumbing.

Too many of these Millennials are technology-spoiled, and will be totally useless when (not IF) the United States faces a serious military threat.

Their silly little Bluetooth devices are no match for an enemy determined to break America.

Wait for it.

[chapeau-noir]

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@liawri-75 wrote:

I do wish that EB would cut a deal like Posh has.  Priority mail prepaid postage for $5.95 up to 5 lbs.  The customer would pay the $5.95 and that would keep us, the sellers from having "calculated rates" that buyers pay.  Just one flat fee.  Simple.

---

It would be nice, but impossible on this site, and would be an administrative nightmare on top of it. Posh is a young site which started out with this scheme, is smaller and more agile than eBay, and the shipping scheme is organic to the site. It also means that even if one purchases a light little item on Poshmark, it still costs $8.30 to ship, so it has to average out. The USPS cannot take a loss on shipping - it's actually law.

[az93]

Apparently usps doesn't know what forever means.

[chapeau-noir]

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@az93 wrote:

Apparently usps doesn't know what forever means.

---

"We will forever be raising our rates".

[johnrj1226]

Am a 44 model, grew up on a farm in Michigan ( near the thumb not  far from the Detroit Rive and Lake Erie).  Here is pic of me reading the Sunday Newspaper in January.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@1786davycrockett wrote:

@simply-the-best-for-you 

" I was talking to a Millenial the other day & he was telling me that he believes the most important achievement of the last 100 years is Bluetooth.  I'm like, more important than commercial flight?  More important than television or a space flight?  Really?  Bluetooth? "

Having spent far more time than I wish to remember shivering inside an outhouse in the 1950s, my vote would be for indoor plumbing.

Too many of these Millennials are technology-spoiled, and will be totally useless when (not IF) the United States faces a serious military threat.

Their silly little Bluetooth devices are no match for an enemy determined to break America.

Wait for it.

---

@1786davycrockett  Well, maybe I'm guilty of being what you're attributing to the milennials now LOL.  Having only ever lived in cities & suburbs, I thought outhouses were in the 1800's, I was floored when my DH told me he actually had one.  I had no idea that so many people alive today actually had one.  He also only had 1 TV station & no FM radio.   To this day, although we line up very closely in musical tastes, he doesn't know the music of some of the most popular bands of the 70's cuz he didn't have FM or a nearby record store.  You know, little bands, like Led Zeppelin.  We went to the movie for my b-day & he finally realized why he'd never known them.  It was b/c they didn't release singles & if it wasn't played on AM, he didn't know it.  

[chapeau-noir]

I didn't have an outhouse, but I had a gas stove/oven that had to be lit by hand - that meant opening the oven door, turning on the gas, lighting a match and tossing it at the gas so it caught. Phoomp! Once I set the front of my hair on fire. I think it was a stove/oven from the 30s. It was during my flophouse days.

[1786davycrockett]

@simply-the-best-for-you 

@chapeau-noir 

In the late 1940s and very early 1950s, my family lived in a basement, with no upper floor -- my father was using the G. I. Bill from World War II to build the rest of the house above us; but, from about 1949 through early 1951, the only home I knew was underground -- with only a few small basement style windows, which were too near the ceiling to view anything outside.  There were so many other post-war families living like this (even though I was just a little kid, I could easily hoist myself up onto the flat roof of many of these underground houses, and walk across my neighbors' rooftops); so the thought never had entered my mind that this was unusual.

Our heat was derived from a coal-powered furnace, and there always seemed to be a pile of coal waiting to be shoveled in the furnace room; and, while we did have indoor plumbing, we also had a "back-up" unit at the rear of the lot -- just in case!  Plus a 55 gallon drum to burn our garbage, and a set of clothesline poles to dry wet laundry -- even in the wintertime!  I still recall joking with my mother that my father would become jealous, if he had seen her wrestling his frozen long-johns off the clothesline when the temperature dropped way below freezing, when the January winds tried to tear them away from her arms -- it actually appeared that my mother was jitter-bugging with my father's frozen long underwear!

And this was in metropolitan St. Paul, MN, not out in the rural sticks -- and we weren't the only ones!  Just a mile or so away was a neighborhood referred to as "Swede Hollow," which was located in the sewer run-off area, just below the Hamm's Beer Brewing Company -- the underpaid brewery, railroad, warehouse and slaughterhouse employees who worked in the area lived in tarpaper shacks along the run-off sewage streams, and each of the shacks had an outhouse perched over the streams, which eventually fed under the railroad tracks, finally dumping in the Mississippi River.  Their drinking water came from a series of communal taps (provided by the Hamm's Beer Company); and the shacks were heated by scrap wood.  Swede Hollow was only a few blocks east of downtown St. Paul; and I can still smell the aroma in the back of my throat.

In 1951, my family moved from urban St. Paul, to one of the new-fangled suburbs about 15 miles away.  And, even though our new home had indoor plumbing, my father built an auxiliary outhouse, behind the garage -- just in case.  We weren't the only ones -- two of the other houses in our neighborhood also used outhouses, since they had no indoor plumbing, except for cold water.  In the summertime, one neighbor stretched out a long rubber hose on the ground, filled with cold water:  when the sun had warmed up the water in the hose to a reasonable temperature, the warm water in the hose was emptied into a galvanized mercury tub; and, one by one, from the youngest to the oldest, this is how she bathed her children.

Makes you wonder how we ever got along without Bluetooth.

Which I still don't own.