The USPS (United States Post Office) is giving away free cards with postage.
http://www.poweroftheletter.com/
At the site click on the free card link. I love free postcards and this is almost as good.
postcards in Bisbee
The free cards are a joint marketing effort of the USPS and HBO to promote a miniseries on John Adams.
The USPS’s idea is to get people to regain the habit of sending cards and letters. But there is a major problem. Fifty years ago a postcard was the least expensive, fastest and most convenient way that you could let someone in another town know what was going on. Now it is fifth on the list in terms of price and convenience. Now Phones, Fax, Email and Text Messaging are all cheaper, faster and easier.
The personal letter and the postcard are doomed.
I say this as a person who sends about 150 postcards a month. I honor the nostalgia of the postcard and wish that we could keep them alive, but they are as doomed as quill pens and velum scrolls. No amount of effort can keep the first class letter a big part of the post office and without it the post office is doomed. It will become in the next fifty years another Amtrak. An expensive anachronism that is to out of date to save and to powerful to kill. It will become for a future generation the poster-child for all that is wrong with government run programs.
In the meantime go to the link above get a free card and send it to me.
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a quick note on amtrak.
though at this point it is a terrible option for long distance travel, it’s still great option for short distance travel, like a long commute. more importantly though, shipping stuff by amtrak is dirt cheap compared to all the other options i found. this is how i’ll be getting my stuff back from chicago to orange county. i know they’re hemorrhaging money because they have no ridership, but when they go, it doesn’t seem like there will be any options left for affordable long-distance moving. it would end up costing me 2-3 times to rent a uhaul for the whole trip compared to what i expect to spend with amtrak, local uhaul delivery/pickup, and the flight home.