andrewteman.org

Idea du jour. Greeting card envelopes with pre-paid postage.

I need to buy a Mother’s Day card today, and it will be a pain in the ass. The card buying itself is not the issue, nor is the concept of Mother’s Day or the greeting card industry to blame for my displeasure, but it is the stamp situation that pains me.

I don’t buy stamps. I don’t buy stamps, mainly because I never mail things. I pay my bills on-line, I don’t write letters, I don’t enter the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes…I really only mail greeting cards, at best 5 or so times per year. But for each of those 5 or so times per year when I DO mail things, tracking down a stamp is a pain in the balls. I need to borrow one from someone (which I just hate doing), buy a whole book of stamps (which I never end up using, and then when rates change, I need to buy the 2 cent stamps…which only compounds the issue), or I need to go to the post office to mail a single greeting card (when there is a mailbox 2 feet from my office).

So Hallmark, American Greetings, whoever…listen up. If you provide two choices for greeting card envelopes when customers purchase Mother’s Day, birthday, Father’s Day cards, etc at CVS, one normal postage-free envelope, and one postage-paid envelope, I am willing to bet that a good portion of the general public would pick up the latter. In fact, personally, I would pay a premium for convenience of postage-paid envelopes. I am guessing that someone like Hallmark could negotiate a pretty sweet bulk deal with the USPS, where they only pay 70% or so of the actual postage rate, and then charge me a 20% premium OVER the standard postage rate on these envelopes, and make a nice cut off of this system.

Just a thought. For now, I will be heading to the post office later. In the rain. With my single greeting card.