Posts Tagged ‘Post Office’

Collectors stories 1

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

In 1962 the United States post office issued a stamp to honour the U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. During the printing process one sheet got turned around so that the yellow printing was inverted.  A stamp collector, Leonard Sherman, spotted the error at his local Post Office and bought the whole sheet for $2, expecting to make a lot of money from it. When the Postmaster General heard about it he ordered another forty million stamps to be printed with the error so that the original sheet was worth no more than the correctly printed stamps.

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Postage stamps to go?

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

For nearly 170 years postage stamps have been used to show that payment has been made to send a letter.  Is this now considered inefficient?  Does Royal Mail want to phase out stamps as a method of pre-payment for postal services?
All the Post Offices are now using sticky labels instead of stamps unless you ask for stamps to be used.  The Post Offices are no longer supplied with stamps above £1 in value.  Values up to £5 are available in complete sheets from Royal Mail.  Royal Mail encourages its customers to buy postage online: print your own postage. Ebay online auction encourages users to print their own postage with a link to Royal Mail.
When asked about this Royal Mail said that they have no plans to stop using postage stamps.
But I wonder how long it will be before we have to buy booklets of self adhesive bar codes or pass our parcels under a laser recording vending machine whilst paying with a smart card.
What do you think?

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