Postal rates are going up; you can stamp your feet now (if you can afford it)

Gas prices are skyrocketing, food is going through the roof. And to add insult to inflationary injury, it will soon cost more to pay your bills.

On Monday, almost all postal rates will increase.

“We’re trying to send out as much as possible before it hits,” said Albert Munez, 25, standing in line Thursday at the Pasadena main post office. At his feet was a large Rubbermaid tub stuffed with packaged, vintage Porsche parts that his company sells.

Travey Brooker was there to send a stack of letters. She and her husband, who is in the military, have numerous friends in the service overseas.

“It’s so nice for someone to get a real letter,” said Brooker, 47. “You can include a little something extra, make it smell nice.

“But now I tell everyone I have to have their e-mail address.”

It’s not a huge rate hike for most consumers – just a penny for a first-class domestic letter, more for most packages and foreign mail. But at a time when other prices are on the rise, the postage pinch gets more noticed.

“Every little bit hurts,” said Jimmy Moore, 24, who was balancing several large envelopes in one hand and text messaging on his phone in the other.

Moore, who was sending out promotional material on the water filtration equipment he sells, works solely on commission. “I spend $20 to $30 a day on postage,” he said. “The extra I will have to pay has to come out of somewhere.”

For big corporations, the hike can be hugely magnified. The rental DVD company Netflix sends out an average of 1.9 million packages per weekday and gets the same amount back. It pays shipping both ways.

But there are two factors which make this postage hike a bit less painful than those in the past.

It’s the first under the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, passed in 2006, that made rate hikes predictable. The law allows the U.S. Postal Service to raise prices once a year and at no more than the rate of inflation.

Therefore, the increase in costs coming Monday amounts to just under 3% for most popular mailing services. And in accordance with the law, the Postal Service had to announce them at least 45 days in advance (it actually beat that goal, announcing this rate hike in February).

“Everything is costing more these days,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said. “But in this case we were able to plan for it. We worked it into our financial guidance.”

The other change was the Forever stamp program implemented by the Postal Service. These stamps, depicting the Liberty Bell, cost the current amount of first-class letter postage – 41 cents each.

But as of 12:01:01 a.m. on Monday, the stamp’s value, and purchase price, suddenly shifts to 42 cents. In fact, as a “forever” product, those stamps will be at the current rate of a first-class mailing no matter how much rates go up in the future.

They are like insurance against rate hikes in the future.

“I’ve bought a bunch of them already,” said Tim Bourne, 32, who runs a foster care agency in Altadena, as he fed coins into a machine carrying booklets of the stamps.

“It’s only a penny,” he said, “but business is business.”

 david.colker@latimes.com