Ordering postage stamps online

Since I hadn’t been in a store of any type for over two months, it had come to this: ordering stamps online.

My stash of stamps had sadly gone very low. It was all down to bad luck. I had been to the post office in order to get stamps on multiple occasions before the quarantine started in deadly earnest — in fact, I went just the very week before. But the post office on the Rice University campus leaves much to be desired. They hardly ever have nice stamps. They had an absolutely trash selection, so I just didn’t buy any. I thought, maybe I can go browse another post office. Before I had the chance, the quarantine struck.

So over the past two months, I have been using the Christmas wreaths stamps to send letters. This is not my style at all. The stamps must be in sync with the season, at least in normal times. But I was driven by desperation.

But finally, even the holiday stamps were running out, so I finally decided to order stamps online. I would have done this much earlier, but you have to create an account on the USPS website in order to order things. I don’t like creating accounts and having my name all over the place. It didn’t end up being that painful, though. You just go to usps.com and it doesn’t take long.

I placed the order on May 13. I got two books of stamps — one with the orchids, one with ‘Eid Mubarak’. Well, Eid has come and gone (May 24-25), and I still don’t have the stamps. I thought they’d just send them, nice and simple, from the local post office. But no! They sent them all the way from the Kansas City distribution center. I don’t know how necessary that was.

I know everything is delayed right now, but just for your reference, the order wasn’t even processed until six days after I placed it, on May 19. Ever since May 22, the tracking status has said that the estimated time of delivery is the next day. But in reality, the shipment only arrived at my local USPS facility on May 23. It arrived in my town on May 25 (today). I guess I will get it tomorrow, but I won’t be surprised if not.

It cost $1.20 extra for the shipping. It was a $1.20 for shipping whether I ordered one booklet or two.

Update: the stamps did arrive on May 26, and they come very unnecessarily wrapped in both plastic protection and a cardstock support. It’s an awful lot of environmentally-wasteful packaging (not to mention the large envelop and the shipping emissions) for two thin books of stamps.