Postage Paid Greeting Card Envelopes

May 10, 2006 in Miscellaneous with 3 Comments

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.

  • http://www.where.com Eric

    Why doesn’t Hallmark just sell single stamps? The checkout person could ask you if you want stamps with your purchase, like they do for every other thing the store is trying to hawk. At least this would be useful. They could mark em up to $.50 for all I care… it would be worth the extra.

  • marvin

    I think you both have great ideas, but think about the US government. They would have to get a cut of the markup I guess. Once you get the government involved things tend to get messy and complicated. What do you think?

  • http://farfromgood.blogspot.com ambs77

    really. you gotta delete the “Clown….” requirement when leaving a comment. ha ha. i hate that word. almost so much that i didn’t comment.

    but i just had to comment on your brilliant (although extremely simple) idea. i, too, would go for the latter.