Taking a Licking : Long Lines and Scarce New Stamps Anger Postal Customers

By 11 a.m., a small mob had huddled around the stamp machine at the Terminal Annex post office in downtown Los Angeles. A tiny woman in a big red sweater was feeding the machine dollar bills and the machine was spitting the dollar bills back out.

Finally it swallowed one. The crowd drew in a breath. She pressed the button for a four-cent stamp.

“SOLD OUT,” a red sign rudely reported, prompting Paul Corrao, a pathologist from West Los Angeles, to begin stomping his feet and stabbing the machine with his right index finger.

“They anticipated this change two years ago and they are not even ready, for God’s sakes!” Corrao hollered. “What are these people doing?”

The 29-cent stamp made its business-day debut Monday and nobody was happy about it. First of all, hardly anyone likes the number 29.

“It’s a weird number,” Adela Marquez said as she stuck stamps on a box of letters announcing the opening of her new business. “I think 27 sounds better than 29. But if you’re going to do it, just go to 30. What the hell.”

The U.S. Postal Service says it printed 8 billion 29-cent stamps and 2 billion four-centers. That’s 16,000 miles of stamps, enough to stretch from New York to Hong Kong and back. And still, in Los Angeles, they seemed to be running out.

When there were no more four-cent stamps at the Rancho Park station on Pico Boulevard, Nabil Antoine had to buy threes and ones. Then somebody traded him four threes and four ones for four fours so he wouldn’t feel left out.

Lines hung out the doors at most area post offices. One woman was offered a dollar for two 29-cent stamps by another woman who didn’t want to wait a half an hour to buy them herself. Customers were double-parked outside the post office in Monrovia, where the demand for four-cent stamps was so unrelenting that the machine broke.

People missed business appointments and skipped lunches just to buy stamps. Retired people stood in line 45 minutes to mail letters that didn’t have to go out until next week.

Even people who had urgent mail to send stood in line rather than put two 25-centers on an envelope and give the post office a few cents profit.

“It’s like losing a dime in the phone booth,” said David Mazer, a spokesman for the Postal Service in Los Angeles. “People don’t like to lose an extra penny if it’s going to an institution.”

The increase will cost the average citizen $8 a year, Mazer said. But so many people rushed to mail letters before the new rate kicked in at 12:01 a.m. Sunday that the main post office in Los Angeles processed 1.5 million letters--three times the amount on a normal Saturday night.

“People were mailing like crazy,” Mazer said, offering these sage words as the surly mobs continued to gather: “You can buy them tomorrow. You can buy them the next day. There are 10 million flower stamps in the Los Angeles area. Believe me, there are plenty of stamps.”

The Postal Service insisted that, unpleasant as it may be, the higher rates are necessary to keep pace with inflation--an explanation that did not sit well with customers who spent half the morning trying to mail a letter.

“It’s just a mess,” Rod Johnson said, standing at a table at Terminal Annex, where he had spread out four little paper stamp bags, a stack of envelopes and a wad of dollar bills. It took him 35 minutes to mail six letters.

“If you put this together with this, then it’s the equivalent of this. See?” Johnson announced proudly, affixing the proper combinations of stamps to his letters.

Easy for him to say. The Postal Service printed the stamps before they knew precisely what the rate increase would be. As a result, the 29-cent stamp doesn’t have a 29 anywhere on it--it has a tulip and the letter F. There’s no 4 on the four-cent stamp, either, only the following message: “This U.S. stamp along with 25 cents of additional U.S. postage is equivalent to the F Stamp rate.”

The Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin might make for easier reading.

“We got all that on one little stamp,” beamed the Postal Service’s Mazer. “And it has a border, too.”

Mabel Ota waited 35 minutes in line and had a stomachache by the time she got to the window at the Rancho Park station on Pico Boulevard, where she asked for 500 four-cent stamps for her employer’s business. Clerk Varghese Titus cringed, told her he had run out of that stamp at 10 a.m., and that she would have to wait at least 15 minutes more for a new shipment to arrive. Then he watched her explode.

“Everybody’s mad,” he said in a tired voice. “It’s just like Christmas.”