Playing catch up with all the blogs all out there

Good Thursday evening all, I hope you're all primed for Friday and a great weekend to come.  I took a little time out today to start reading some blogs that have been around for a while, and I suppose it's probably wise for me to do some reading of older posts that veteran bloggers have made over the past couple of years.  I found one blog that I started following not too long ago, the Chronicles of Fuji.  This post that piqued my interest was one about the the post office, especially the rates that are being charged to ship brown bubble mailers.

First off, I want to say that Fuji does make some good points here.  Yes, it is getting more expensive to mail cards out at the post office, and when you do make a lot of trades as he does, it does become quite expensive.  $40 to send out 15 trades is a little steep when you look at it that way, that money could be used to buy a couple of blaster boxes, or a reasonably cheap hobby box if you're so inclined.  With the 150 trades he made last year, that's over $256 worth of postage (and that's assuming all envelopes were sent at the minimum $1.71).

My question is (and I'm not being critical of Fuji at all here), did the items he received in return give him "value" worth that money spent?  I hope they did, because if not, then I can definitely understand the frustration with the cost.  Don't get me wrong here, I am as cheap as they come, and I'll do anything to save a buck.  But I would say that the approximately $70 I've spent in postage so far in the past two months has brought myself (and hopefully those I've traded with), easily that much pleasure, if not more.  Trust me, until now I had never even thought of the total amount I've spent on postage since I started blogging 8 weeks ago. 

I guess what I'm really saying here is that postage should be looked at as a part of the cost of collecting.  We pay postage for boxes that are sent to us by online card merchants.  We pay postage for our eBay purchases (sometimes we overpay, but that's another topic altogether).  Postage for trades is actually something that is easier for me to swallow, because I know that in return someone is sending me cards that I want, whether it be Blue Jays for my collection, or singles towards building the plethora of sets I'm working on. 

One more point, and you can trust me on this one.  Postage, and the post office are definitely a necessary evil, because without the post office, there are very few alternatives, and believe me, the alternatives aren't pretty.

Finally, without postage, these are three beauties I never get to add to my collection:

Courtesy of other fine collectors, and the USPS delivery service.

As always, thanks for reading, Robert...