Postal Service Requesting People Take All These Simpsons Stamps Off Their Hands
Are you a big Simpsons fan? You’re in luck! Stamps featuring characters from the popular show were issued back in 2009 and 2010, but the USPS still has a few left. And by “a few,” we mean 682 million.
Seems the postal service vastly overestimated how many people wanted Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Maggie on their mail, because only about a third of the initial printing run of a billion Simpsons stamps were sold. And since they were marked as $.44 stamps and it currently costs $.45 to mail a first-class letter, chances are slim they’ll ever be sold — meaning the whole shebang cost the USPS a whopping $1.2 million.
Special-issue stamps in general seem to be a money pit. In a new report, the Postal Service Inspector General said 2.1 billion such stamps went unsold in the past few years, including almost 400 million from a Flags of our Nation series. That debacle alone set the USPS back $716,000.
But even if all those stamps had sold, it wouldn’t have done much to help the postal service’s current financial woes. The USPS just defaulted on a $5.5 billion payment it owes the US Treasury, and will likely miss another payment next month for the same amount.
Looks like the postal service is out a ton of…wait for it…D’oh!