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A few years ago I read an article about how smaller town diamond merchants send their stock to each other by ordinary First Class mail. The article said that outside New York the incidence of First Class mail going astray is nearly nonexistent. Apfelbaum’s send out thousands of packages per year, mostly through the postal […]

Its hard to believe that the post office’s troubles are as bad as some are saying when a simple two part solution can fix so many money issues. The Post Office announced that it is closing half of the main sorting facilities that it operates and that this will save the Post Office $6.5 billion

Stamp theft, despite the scare stories that you sometimes hear, is really not much of a problem. We rarely have a customer inform us that his stamps were stolen and the APS’s stamp theft committee almost never sends out an advisory of a stolen collection. In the 1970’s stamp theft was more of an issue

International stamp shows have long lead times. The announcements have already begun for the next US based International show which will be held in New York in 2016(http://www.ny2016.org/)  International shows are held under the auspices of the FIP (Federation Intenational de Philatelie) a group that arranges international competitive exhibits and certifies stamp shows. The United

There is no more valuable substance in the world by weight and volume than original gum. Consider -the gum on a thousand mint US Ten Cent 1847s if miraculously removed, commingled and weighed would total about an ounce. And the value of such gum on the stamps is $12,500 for each stamp according to the latest

Increasingly, the political calculus seems to be the game of chicken. In the US debt extension negotiations in Congress this summer the idea of compromise was considered unacceptable, largely by the Republicans. In the European debt crisis going on now, the Germans have taken the same position. The idea that intransigence is a smart political

The current Euro mess has seemed to have little impact so far on the stamp market. The Euro has fallen some 15% against the dollar and the financial system in Europe is in turmoil but prices for European stamps seem stable. There is little buying from the weaker European areas, countries like Italy and Spain which would see serious

 Yesterday’s post (about a private delivery service that operates at Airport TSA checkpoints to allow passengers to send back to themselves items of value that they unintentionally brought to a plane and are to be tossed as not acceptable boarding material) got me thinking about what is the major cause of the Post Offices budgetary

Last weekend I spent some time with the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration, the government agency that operates under the Department of Homeland Security to make our air travel safer. TSA has a variety of hard to understand rules about what you can and cannot take through security when you fly on a commercial airliner.