Mail service has changed drastically

Recently, the “forever” stamps again increased in value.

The cost of mailing a first class United States Postal Service Letter is now 73 cents, up from 68 cents.

One thing you really didn’t hear was a lot of complaining about it from folks.

I guess this is because few people still use it on a regular basis like we used to.

Paying bills and most communication has transitioned to social media and email connections. Of course, this is the precise reason why the Postal Service had to raise the rates, because of less and less usage of the service.

To properly put this 73 cents in perspective I found this interesting.

As it progresses through what remains to this day as pretty much barren wasteland in Nevada and Utah, U.S. 50 is named “The Loneliest Road In America” for good reason. 

This was the original route of The Overland Stage and the short-lived Pony Express. Here one can still see ruins of the original stage stops and facilities that were built to provide fresh horses for riders on The Pony Express. The stops were placed roughly every 10 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to the end of the trail in Sacramento, California. If you complain about the cost of mailing a letter now, bear this fact in mind. In 1860, a one-half ounce letter carried by The Pony Express cost a whopping $5.  An astronomical amount of money in 1860 dollars, that amounts to almost $190 in today’s money. 

The mounts cost $200 each and the riders for The Pony Express were salaried at $100 a month at a time when an average blue-collar worker earned a wage of between 45 cents and $1 a day depending on the skill of their labor. After 19 months, The Pony Express faded into history after the completion of a transcontinental telegraph line that was established by Western Union. 

Eventually Wells Fargo and The Overland Stage Company, and later The Union Pacific Railroad’s eventual completion, rendered The Pony Express obsolete. 

The Pony Express settled up at a final run of roughly 35,000 pieces of mail delivered in its 19-month run, had sales revenues of $90,000 and costs of $200,000, making it a profit-and-loss loser in the end. 

At its peak, The Pony Express was able to deliver a letter from the East Coast to California in a mere 10 days, which was widely considered to be an impossible feat at that time. 

The record was seven days and seven hours to get the news to California from Washington, D.C., announcing the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860. 

It was an incredible feat with the technology available at the time.