If you're mailing cards or gifts, rather than hand-delivering, the price of that service has been rising. This is not a surprise to many who have been shrewdly buying Forever stamps from the US Postal Service over the years.
But there may be a surprise in that the pace of increase hasn't been that different from the overall inflation rate. Over the past year, the price change for "postage and delivery" services is 4.3 percent, although the 10-year change is about 41 percent. (The price hikes for a first-class stamp have actually been slightly smaller than that, for both the year and the decade.)
