Latvian post company now licks stamps for a fee
Latvian state-owned postal company Latvijas Pasts has launched a new paid service of helping customers to prepare their mail, including licking stamps. As of August, post offices in the small Baltic nation have been charging 0.03 lats (5.8 US cents) for gluing stamps to envelopes.
Arranging mail takes additional time and resources, spokeswoman Inese Kreicberga told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
“Postal regulations provide that a client is responsible for preparing a letter to be sent, while the post delivers it,” Kreicberga said.
“To those clients who want postal operators to help them with drawing up a letter, the post can offer such a service for payment,” she said.
Latvijas Pasts has been plagued by financial troubles in recent months. The second least profitable company in the country, Latvijas Pasts lost 4.87 million lats (USD 9.56 million) in 2006, according to a report published earlier this week.
The company has raised rates for money order and faced a threat of employee strike at the end of July.
The government of Latvia is considering converting post offices throughout the country into postal banks, merging postal offices with bank branches in approximately 700 locations in the European Union Baltic country of 2.3 million people.
