Post Office Says It Has New Stamp Furor Licked

Like Michael Jackson fans swarming for concert tickets, San Diegans have flooded local post offices in the last couple of days to snap up millions of three-cent stamps to augment their outdated 22-cent stamps for first class mail.

Since Friday, San Diego postal customers have purchased 10.5 million three-cent stamps--a vast increase over the 500,000 a month that local post offices have sold on the average, said Mike Cannone, communications manager for the San Diego region.

The buying frenzy has been so furious that the San Diego region will receive an emergency infusion of 20 million stamps today, Cannone said. The extra stamps will be farmed out to stations in Los Angeles, Van Nuys, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Phoenix and Tucson as supplies diminish there, he said.

New postal rates went into effect Monday, hiking the cost of a first-class letter from 22 cents to 25 cents. The proposed increase was announced only 10 days before, and the lack of adequate lead time was responsible for creating the rush at San Diego post offices, Cannone said.

“The lines were long Friday and Saturday,” said Cannone. “Monday was the typical nightmare because it was the first day of the new rates.

“I counted 35 people in line in the main post office on Midway Drive on Monday.”

To deal with the surge of customers, supervisors in the area’s 93 post offices called in all of their employees that were off, opened all of their windows and stationed supervisors in the lobby. They also opened “stamps only” lines.

Vending machine specialists had to work 12-hour days to keep up with the demands of customers, who exhausted the supply of three-cent and the new, 25-cent “E” stamp from the machines every two hours. Normally, vending machines have to be replenished every three days, Cannone said.

John Williams, manager of the main post office at 2535 Midway, compared the crowds to what it’s like during a “very busy Christmas.”

Tuesday, for instance, the post office sold 160,000 three-cent stamps. The daily average of all stamps sold at Midway is 30,000, said Williams.

At one point, tempers flared as customers waited in the long lines. Williams said that at the Midway station on Monday he had to step between two men who appeared to be on the brink of a fistfight because one man thought the other had cut into line.

In the largest purchase, one company bought 25,000 three-cent stamps on Monday from Midway. And a person who identified himself as a political candidate purchased 7,000 of the stamps to hand out to prospective voters as a campaign stunt, said Williams.

By Wednesday, the furor had died down considerably, however, and lines at the main post office were close to normal, Williams said.

Cannone said the rush for stamps was not the only thing that caused the long lines at San Diego post offices during the last several days. Customers were also taking longer at the window to ask about the increase in all postage rates, not just for first class.

Answering those questions meant that post office workers were taking about 2.5 minutes with each customer, compared to the 30 to 45 seconds it takes during a normal transaction.

Meanwhile, post offices across Los Angeles ran out of 3-cent stamps when they were overrun by people trying to buy the extra postage. Some patrons were forced to buy batches of 1-cent stamps to paste onto their letters before they could toss them into mail chutes.

Officials said post offices in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties have sold 28 million 3-cent stamps in the last week.

“We’ve had people in Anaheim buying too many 3-cent stamps and having to come back and buy more 22-cent stamps to go along with them,” said Joseph Breckenridge, a spokesman for the Postal Services division headquarters in Santa Ana.

Times staff writer Bob Pool in Los Angeles contributed to this report.