This has come up several times. How can these stamps be real? Who would sell them? Are they authentic? Or a scam?
I bought some and used them for Christmas cards. All were delivered. No problems as far as I know. They may be stolen or counterfeit but the post office accepts them.
Do you honestly think the Post Office is checking things like that? You are lucky you get your mail delivered. Sometimes.
Official stamps can be verified by scanning for proprietary inks which are used on the official ones. Whether that is done on a wholesale basis or not I don’t know, but it should be pretty easy to have the computer sorters which already read the addresses to doi so, I would think.
As for “delivery reliability”, USPS comes in 3rd, but close to UPS and FedEx. USPS, of course, handles magnitudes of order more volume than either of those other two.
According to recent data, **UPS delivered 97.5% of packages on time, followed by FedEx at 95.2%, and USPS at 94.3%** .https://www.veeqo.com/blog/ups-usps-fedex-comparison#
I’m not impressed with the USPS. I sent my sister a certified letter on 1-8-24. After about 10 days she had not received it, so I went online to track it. Their system said it was in Greensboro N.C and was in transit. So we waited another 10 days. Went online to track it and their system said it was still in the same place. I filed a complaint, and a person from the N.C. postal system said it was stuck in Kansas due to weather. I replied that was not what your system says. She never answered back. I went down to our local post office and they ran a check that confirmed what the online system was reporting.
They evidently lost the letter. I had to go to the bank and put a stop payment on the check that was in the letter. While the bank employee was processing the stop payment we started talking about the lost letter. He said he has seen this happen often with customers. He even related having a similar experience with a package that he sent through the mail.
I wired my sister the money while I was there. I’m not going to trust the USPS with delivering critical pieces of mail anymore.
I understand. Then again, I’ve had two lost deliveries from FedEx in the last two years (one recovered: it was delivered to a completely different neighborhood; the other lost forever), and one from UPS about 4 years ago. Spit happens, as they say.
The post office has software that does all sorts of things. Reads barcodes. Detects and cancels the stamp on a letter.
Detection of counterfeit stamps is very possible. May take extra programming. Or maybe counterfeit quality is too good to detect. Or maybe the stamps are authentic.
Who knows? All speculation.
I do know the post office does not sell stamps at any significant discount. To anyone. Merchants that sell stamps buy them at very near face value; they do it for the good will and convenience, not because they make money on it.
The only way you get big discount stamps is if Susie is hot-fingering them from her office, or if Harry finds a couple of rolls in a drawer from a desk he’s trashing. Otherwise, no, they’re not real.
Counterfeit Stamps – United States Postal Inspection Service.
I hear ya brother. We have to use Express Scripts for our medications and Express Scripts insists on using DHL as a delivery service. We had a $300-$400 package of meds we could track to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and as far as I know it’s still up in North Houston somewhere. Never did receive the package. We went through literal Hell trying to straiten their mess out. Money tied up too cuz they ain’t gonna give you a replacement med. Oh, no, you then have to deal with CVS. Took a long time to get things back to normal. Thank you very much DHL, USPS and especially Express Scripts.
Suppose you buy a business or an estate that has a large stock of stamps. What do you do with them? Who would buy them?
They can be legit. But counterfeit seems more likely. Or stolen from the post office distribution system.
There’s a fair discount on forever stamps at Costco, used 'em for years with no problems…
Probably a loss leader of some sort.
There may be an advantage to the USPS in selling 100 stamps that justifies some degree of discount. I wonder how many stamps never get used! For me, 100 would be more than a lifetime supply.