Licking the Cost of Stamps

A clever entrepreneur is about to launch a business that consists of buying stamps from the Post Office for 22 cents and reselling them to the public for 17 cents.

That looks like a good way to go broke, but in between buying them high and selling them low, American Discount Stamps Ltd. of Houston will affix the stamps to the upper right-hand corner of a 2-inch-by-3-inch gummed label, the rest of which will be imprinted with advertising, which will more than pay for the difference. Advertising on postage stamps? Well, almost.

The entire gummed label gets pasted to an envelope, and everybody winds up happy: the advertiser, who gets his message displayed; the consumer, who gets a nickel off the price of mailing a letter, and American Discount Stamps Ltd., which hopes to clean up in the bargain.

The Post Office, by the way, has no problem with this. As long as American Discount buys its stamps at face value, it can do anything it wants with them, and if the stamps are still intact, they’re still good as postage.

The advertising industry says that David A. Lloyd, president of American Discount, has discovered one of the world’s few untapped advertising media. It’s certainly a bright idea. The stamps will go on sale in April in packages of 10 for $1.70. We plan to buy a few packages to use to mail bill payments. They might look strange on personal letters, but who writes personal letters any more?

It’s a good way to hold down the rising cost of postage, and why not? Maybe Lloyd can come up with some more untapped advertising media.