Bad Use of Low-Cost Postage

Brazilian postal service (Correios), one of the few things run by the brazilian government that works really well, offers a low-cost postage alternative, called "carta social" (word-by-word translation would read "social letter"). The "carta social", as per the Correios website, is "a postal service offered by Correios to facilitate the access to the postal services for those from the less favoured social classes of the Brazilian population.". It has some requirements, such as the need to be always hand-written, always be addressed to and from an individual, among others, but it is not like the similar product offered by the USPS called Nonprofit Mail, which requires a formal approval from the USPS. Here, anyone can just label an envelope "carta social" and pay one cent (R$ 0.01) for the postage, as a symbolic rate. Quite fair for a company run by the government, right? The government has the obligation to offer such a service.

The problem is that there is always someone that thinks the goverment is hiding the low-cost postage from the population just because they don't want all the population to know they can send a letter for just a penny. And I think they do, in a sense. No matter how much you emphasize on the correct usage of the product, there will be a lot of guys labeling their mail as "carta social", just to save a couple of bucks, intentionally forgetting (or ignoring) the noble intention of the service offered. I am not even close of being an enthusiast of the Brazilian government, but I'll understand if they don't want everybody to know about the existence of the "carta social" at all.

After the invention of the Internet, I haven't received much personal mail. In the past, I used to receive some letters and christmas cards labeled as "carta social". From people like me, engineers, that I don't think would have their budget hurt by that extra dollar. I just used to get back to those guys and ask "Hey, do you know what "carta social" was created for?". Two answers I normally get are: "No." or "For paying just a penny for the postage.". This makes me really sad. Someone just told them that writing those two words on the front of the envelope allows them to pay just a penny for the postage. Couldn't they just tell them the whole story?!?

But what really pisses me off are those "spam" email chains that we always receive, with an intrincate conspiracy theory around the government, that they hide the low-cost postage from the people to make more money on the taxpayers and, because of that, everybody should use the "carta social" as a way to show them that the people's power cannot be denied, bla, bla, bla...

If the spam was to encourage everybody to discuss the R$ 0.55 rate for the regular mail postage, I'd be ok with them. I'd still just delete it, because I think the rate is reasonable (although slightly high), comparing to the $0.39 (about R$ 0.85 today) americans pay for first-class postage.

By the way, although I didn't pay anything to use this blog system, I could label it a "social blog post", due to its informative, non-profit nature... What do you think?