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A first class letter's cost rises Sunday from 33 to 34 cents.
By JOUNICE L. NEALY
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 4, 2001
Nicole Sawyer is relocating to Fort Lauderdale and wrapping up last-minute details before she leaves St. Petersburg.
She had just mailed a bunch of letters and then froze. "I'm like, 'Oh, no!' "
For a moment, Sawyer thought her postage was a penny short.
"But I'm safe until the seventh, which is good," Sawyer said Wednesday.
Starting Sunday, new postal rates take effect and the cost of a first-class letter will rise a penny to 34 cents. Other postal service rates will increase, but 20-cent postcards will remain the same.
Customers are trickling into post offices to buy either 1-cent stamps or the new 34-cent stamps.
"A lot of people have 33-cent stamps and just need to get 1-cent stamps," said Sue Harton, a spokeswoman for the St. Petersburg post office. Customers who are due change at the post office can just ask for stamps instead, she suggested.
"We've got a lot of them," Harton said. The 34-cent stamps went on sale Dec. 15.
At local post offices in the Tampa Bay area, there are more than 70-million 1-cent stamps.
So if customers have to drop a letter in the mail on Sunday and only have 33-cent stamps, "don't panic and, even as a worst case scenario, buy a 34-cent stamp and get your 1-cent stamps later," said Gary Sawtelle, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.
Sawtelle expected that most post offices will be swamped Monday, the day after the new rates take effect and people realize they don't have the proper postage.
The cost of a 2-pound priority mail package is increasing from $3.20 to $3.95 and 1 pound will be $3.50. Before that, customers could send a priority mail package up to 2 pounds for $3.20.
The 4.6 percent overall rate increases will add about $2.7-billion in revenue, with just $1-billion from the additional penny for first-class letters alone.
While the cost of a first-class stamp will rise, each additional ounce will drop from 22 cents to 21 cents.
The price of stamps already has jumped twice in the last five years. In January 1995 the price went from 29 cents to 32 cents. The last rate increase was in 1999, when first-class rates also went up a penny.
"I think they (carriers) deserve it," said Barbara Moore of St. Petersburg. "Everything goes up. But people don't notice as much when it's only a penny."
- Information from Cox News Service was used in this report.