Frugal Intuition

The holiday season is upon us (and has been for a month if retailers are to be believed–Christmas stuff out before Halloween–c’mon guys!) and with it comes the headache of shipping.  This means that you have to package your stuff to ship, take your happy self to the nearest Post Office, where you’re likely to face long lines, eating up your precious lunch break and leaving you entirely cranky the rest of the day.  Maybe that’s just me…

In case you can’t tell, I hate going to the Post Office.  There’s not one that’s truly convenient for me, and it’s never a zip in and out sort of prospect.  The reason this is on my mind today is that I have my first book to ship for Bookmooch, which I talked about this weekend.  I was convinced I was going to have to go to the post office to ship it, as I have never before been able to print a shipping label for media mail from my home (or in this case, work) computer.  But ah, then I discovered Stamps.com.  With their Postage On Demand service you:

• Eliminate gas-guzzling trips to the Post Office.™
• Save over 80% compared to a postage meter.
• Make mail look more professional.
• Never overpay for postage again.
• Print on envelopes, labels or plain paper.

I was able to print my media mail label for $2.41, and I’ll be able to drop it in the outgoing mail for work.  No extra gas.  No waste of my lunch break.  I was forced to buy the delivery confirmation for $0.18, but given how things tend to get lost in the mail these days, that’s not a bad idea anyway. It was absolutely worth the avoidance of a headache.

And then I went to read the details for this post.

I discovered that there is a $17.99 monthly charge for this service.  Apparently in my haste and excitement at having found somewhere to print media mail postage, I missed that part.  Oops.  So I logged into the account and went to cancel the service.  Of course I had to call customer service to do so.  I will say that their customer service was prompt, incredibly polite, and a pleasure to deal with as far as customer service goes.  They do have a cheaper plan that’s $9.99 a month, and for people who actually do ship stuff on a regular basis, it might be worth looking into.  As this is the first thing I have shipped in months, it’s not practical for me.  The upside, I canceled within what was apparently a 4 week trial period, so no harm done.

All is not lost!

Well, as I said, there is a 4 week trial period, so if you have access to a Pitney Bowes machine or scale to weigh your packages without going to the P.O., you could still sign up at Stamps.com to print all your postage for the holidays and mail stuff.  You just have to remember to cancel the service at the end of the trial to avoid the monthly fee.  

That having been said, the actual U.S.P.S. website allows you to print postage as well for first class, priority mail, and express mail–without a monthly fee, so if you want to ship that way, you can still avoid the hassle of going to the P.O.  This whole quest started for me because I wanted to ship something media mail, which the U.S.P.S. website doesn’t appear to allow for reasons that escape me.

If anybody out there knows of a way to do this without having to pay a fee, let me know!

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