My favorite amateur sociologist, Rob Cockerham, scalped postage stamps on tax day.
If you live near Sacramento, California, and you wait until the very last moment to mail your taxes, you are in for a special trip to the main Post Office in West Sacramento.Read the results on his website, Cockeyed.comThis particular post office is open until midnight, so you can drop off your tax return at 11:59pm on April 15th and still get the necessary postmark.
On tax night, traffic is so heavy that the local police set up something like a tax-return drive-thru checkpoint, where post workers will snatch the envelopes right out of your window.
Unfortunately, they don't sell stamps. To get stamps, you have to drive past the envelope drive-thru snatchpoint and discover the secret post office entrance. Then you have to park and wait in line to buy some stamps from the human tellers, because they replaced all the vending machines with a single automatic postal machine (APM), and that machine was stolen last year.
The no-stamp oversight annoyed me so much that this year I decided to try selling stamps myself.
Early in the day, I bought one hundred first class (44¢) stamps.
Then I went home and made myself a sign. Note the hefty price markup.
That's right. I was scalping postage stamps. I was going to be rich.
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