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John Cletheroe's
USA and Canada Holiday Hints |
If you are visiting the USA or Canada and wish to send letters or postcards to your home country, the best place to purchase your stamps is at an official post office. Stamps are available in many shops but their sales assistants are very unlikely to know the correct postage rates for overseas destinations. Finding a post office in a small town and parking outside it will normally be much easier than in a large town or city.
We've always found the staff at post offices in the USA and Canada very friendly, helpful and efficient.
Mail drops, equivalent to British pillar boxes, are often found outside post offices. However, they can often be confused with trash bins, so be careful. You normally have to lift a metal flap before you can put your letters in. If you have your letters or postcards ready to be sent then the post office assistant will normally take them for you after you have attached the stamps, saving you the job of finding a mail drop.
For foreign destinations the cost of stamps usually far exceeds the cost of postcards. In the summer of 2000 the cost of sending a normal sized postcard from Canada to the UK was CDN$0.95. In April 2001 the cost of sending a normal sized postcard from the USA to the UK was US$0.70.
In September 2004 Jim Baldwin sent me this comment:
Most Canadian Post Offices are located as agencies inside of hardware stores or pharmacies or even 7-Eleven convenience stores. The only standalone post offices are the major post offices that act as mail distribution and transfer points such as where the mail delivery man would go each morning to collect his mail for the day. In rural small towns that warrant only one post office, it will be a standalone building.
Also, just like in Britain, it is a private storekeeper who will be the person who handles your package, postage and such. Canada Post when they need a new post office (usually one per neighbourhood) will accept bids for the new Post Office agency. The pharmacy, hardware store, corner shop, etc usually makes minimal money running the post office but since the foot traffic entering the store is so great this is good for the business. In Ontario "Shoppers Drug Mart" runs many of the Post Offices in urban areas.
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Most recently modified 12-Mar-06