Postal rates went up again yesterday. It makes me sick to see the prices that our customers are having to pay to transport books from our house to theirs. We really need to find a way to distribute so that people can buy locally and not have to pay shipping. Either that, or someone needs to invent an instantaneous transporter. I wish we could afford to do what Amazon does and offer free shipping. Perhaps when we’re bigger we can, but the margins are too slim right now. We were glad to try offering it over the holidays so that we could get books out to people who otherwise could not afford to buy, but it cut into our margin too heavily for us to make that a permanent option. Now I need to go into our store and tweak all the shipping settings to make sure that postage is being calculated properly.
7 thoughts on “Postal rate increase”
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You know what?
The price of modern shipping is nothing short of The Future.
For about ten bucks, I can have a book taken from your doorstep, carried over mountains and rivers, in some cases across great plains, and in a couplafew days, arrive in good condition on my stoop.
This is INCREDIBLE.
I recently had a television (A TV!!!) picked up from somewhere near Chicago, and driven to my door. For a hundred bucks. I couldn’t drive ME from Chicago to california for a hundred bucks.
You’re probably bigger than a TV. And you need to be fed on the trip.
(But yes, I agree… it’s miraculous, and we’ve started to take it for granted.)
I’m a little taller then it, but it’s wider then I am. And we’re about the same weight. 😉
Excellent point. I should not complain about an incremental increase in the price of a service without which I could not do business at all.
And yet, a letter used to be able to be sent for a penny and got there faster; I heard stories from the 19teens where a mother would put a warm roasted chicken in the morning mail and her daughters in New York City would get it in the afternoon mail (there was more than one mail delivery in those days)–and the roast would still be warm.
I think the biggest problem nowadays with the mail, and the reason we keep getting charged so much more every year (thank heavens I got a book of Forever Stamps) is because there’s simply so much more of it. There was a lot less junk mail, a lot less being shipped commerce-wise, and despite fewer letters being sent today (due to email) and even e-billing nowadays for many people, the amount of mail/packages being sent every year just grows–making it necessary to hire more handlers.
And of course now it makes me wonder about plane vs. train mail (do they still ship mail by train, and if so, how does our aging rail system nowadays compounded by relatively more traffic affect the speed by which things are shipped compared to yesteryear as well?). And wish for a good train system all over the country simply for travel purposes. Etc etc.
Sure, you used to be able to do that. In London about 80 years ago (I guess) you could post something in the morning and get a reply in the afternoon.
However, what you couldn’t do was order something from Sandra and Howard, pay a few extra $$ and get it sent half way around the world in less than a week. I believe there’s no such thing as surface mail between the UK and the US any more, everything is arimail now, apart from the stuff that’s too big to go by mail at all.