This has been rolling around in my head for a very long time and now and then, it pops up. I suppose I’ve covered some of it in my discussions on stamp NFTs, but two recent things happened and I wanted to talk about it in more detail.
First, a discussion on a stamp forum about the USPS just packing it in because they provide terrible service, which I absolutely agree with, and secondly, I’ve started watching a UK-based coin channel, mostly because I get bored, called Christopher Collects. He’s the YouTube face for a UK coin dealership and in a lot of those videos, they bring up what I have a problem with.
However, we’ll get into both of those things in more detail below. See you there.
The first, I think most of us can agree with. The service that we get from the United States Postal Service sucks. It has for a very long time and it isn’t getting any better. This came up again in another discussion from a while ago, where someone took a special cachet cover to the local post office for Pi-day. The first refused to cancel it and the second did and then when he wanted the envelope back, the clerk scribbled all over it to obliterate the cancel. That is absolutely not acceptable.
The post office has tons of problems. The mail is slow, things get lost, the whole system is totally unreliable and the purpose of the post office, the reason it exists at all, is to move the mails. Yet, we see garbage like NFTs, collector sets (which recently seem to go out of stock near immediately for some reason), etc. Even the production of modern stamps, they’re made to appeal to collectors and the general public to sock away and not actually put them in the mails where they’re supposed to go. It’s producing things for money that don’t fulfill the purpose that they are supposedly in business to perform.
A little of that, I suppose, is fine. After all, stamp collectors are keeping stamps instead of using them for their stated purpose, but that’s our choice, not theirs. The same stamps you get over the counter, it ought to be our decision whether to use them for the posting of mail or of sticking them in an album. The post office ought to be expecting all of it to go right through their system. It’s why they exist, after all.
On the very few occasions that I go into a post office these days, and I might be an oddball in that regard, as I don’t automatically support the USPS, mostly because I stopped collecting U.S. stamps in 1993 because of all of the problems that the post office has, but on those rare occasions, there are tons of merch displays trying to sell things to collectors. Shirts. Hats. Pins. Collector packs. None of it moves the mail, it’s all just an additional revenue stream. I’m not complaining about people who want to buy it, that’s up to you, but I’ve never seen the point.
I will admit though that I’ve been considering getting some wall part for the house featuring stamps, but those aren’t produced by the post office. It’s decoration, not a way to fund a barely functional postal service. I suppose the same could be said for things like souvenir sheets, or the now-popular souvenir pages, but until recently, those have been relatively few and far between. Now, they’ve ramped it up to 11.
Granted, I have seen a fair number of collectors who hate the very existence of souvenir sheets, issued for special occasions and to some degree I agree, too many is too many and there are some countries, including countries that I collect (China, I’m looking at you) that go crazy producing them, but again, that’s our choice to buy them and they are legal postage regardless so I don’t much mind it in moderation.
The second though, that’s really something that’s been bugging me a lot. Not the Christopher Collects channel, that’s oddly cathartic until you realize that most of his videos are exactly the same, but the ideas that come out, especially in the videos of the Britannia Coin Company channel. See, my wife and I tried, for a short period of time, to collect coins many years ago. We have a bin of coins that we got, before we realized that we hated the community and what a good portion of coin collectors represented. Whereas I think most stamp collectors are really nice people who understand that they’re collecting little pieces of paper with no intrinsic value, the same can’t be said for a lot of coin collectors. There, it’s not a collection, it’s an investment. Even if the value of the coins becomes nil, they’re still worthwhile because they are often made of precious metals. It’s the spot value that carries a lot of weight among numismatists.
I really hate that. I have never collected a thing in my life for the financial value of it. I collect because I like it, not because I think there’s a profit to be made. I really don’t much like people who collect as a retirement hedge. Hobbies are supposed to be money-losing propositions. It’s like food. You don’t go to the store and buy food as an investment. You get it because you enjoy eating it.
Just an example that doesn’t come from the U.S. Mint.
But here’s the deal, and this certainly isn’t the Britannia Coin Company’s fault, but the Royal Mint in the UK, and they are absolutely not at all alone in this, they spend a lot of time producing things aimed at collectors, not at doing the job that they exist to do. Proof sets, silver sets, gold sets, things that are sold for the express purpose of being hoarded, for the investment potential and not for the financial good of the country. Granted, the Royal Mint is in a different situation than the USPS is, they’re just a producer, just like the companies that print stamps are a producer, but the whole thing just strikes me as a scam of sorts. If your purpose is to move the mails or to fund the economy, having a side hustle where you’re just selling a bunch of extraneous nonsense that makes you extra money beyond actually having to do the job you’re in business to do, that bugs me a lot.
