Remember those cool-ass Simpsons stamps that I was raving about two years ago? Well it turns out the Postal Service completely misjudged the popularity of The Simpsons Franchise by about, oh, seven hundred million.
According to Bloomberg, all those beautiful, beautiful stamps are now just sitting in a stamp warehouse somewhere waiting to be disposed of, which is a real tragedy:
Bloomberg’s Dominic Chu reports that the money-losing U.S. Postal Service guessed that TV cartoon character Homer Simpson and his family were twice as popular as Elvis Presley when it came to sales of commemorative stamps. The service produced 1 billion of “The Simpsons ” stamps and sold 318 million with the remainder being disposed at a loss.
I don’t get why they can’t just continue selling them? I’d still buy ’em. Maybe they could include bonus 1-cent stamps of Snowball II and Santa’s Little Helper to cover the increase of stamp prices? Just thinking out loud here.
Anyway, the unsold stamps cost the already super-cost-strapped quasi-private Postal Service that’s struggling just to survive $1.2 million. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $15 billion it might be losing come September thanks to stupid reguations like having to fund retiree health care benefits more than 70 years in advance, not being allowed to compete directly with FedEx and UPS, and having to overpay pension funds (I’m cribbing all this from Political Irony). I don’t understand why they forced the Postal Service – the only constitutionally-mandated federal agency, mind you – to become mostly-privatized in the first place, forced to finance itself and expected to make a profit on top of all that, but whatever.