Goodbye, stamp vending machines: Post office phasing out aging equipment.
Postage stamps can be purchased by mail, at the supermarket, even from many bank cash machines. But there’s one place you won’t be able to get them in a few years – vending machines at the post office.
The U.S. Postal Service plans to eliminate its 23,000 vending machines by 2010, the agency said in a recent internal memo.
The vending machines aren’t the only changes that are under way. The postal service is also removing many of those freestanding blue mailboxes where people can drop letters.
Postal spokeswoman Yvonne Yoerger yesterday confirmed the vending machine decision, first reported by Linn’s Stamp News.
“The heart of the matter is a lot of these machines are up to 20 years old,” she said, meaning breakdowns are increasing and replacement parts are costly or impossible to get.
In the meantime there are lots of other options to buy stamps that fit into people’s lifestyles better, Yoerger said, noting that people can get stamps by mail, through phone orders, at many convenience stores and from rural letter carriers.
Customers still will be able to buy stamps from postal clerks, and the agency is increasing its use of automated postal centers that print postage on demand and also can sell some stamps.
Yoerger also noted that recent Treasury Department changes to make currency harder to counterfeit have required costly changes in vending machines so they can handle the new bills.
The removals are expected to begin next year with about 5,900 machines eliminated annually.
Broken machines and those that do little business will be removed first. If a machine works well but makes few sales it will be moved to a busier area to replace broken or damaged machines.
Removals of the blue mail boxes are a result of a decline in first-class mail, Yoerger said.
The post office counts those boxes among “collection points,” which also include the green relay boxes, where carriers store mail during delivery, and mail slots at post offices.
As of the end of last year, the post office had 295,052 collection points, down from 337,230 at the end of 1999.
