I thought IRCs were phased out in 2013 but apparently the PO delayed the deadline until the end of this year. This Reddit item shows a redemption ticket for 525 one-cent coupons and 7 “Jimmy Carter” coupons at 82 cents each.
Some of the USPS employees at Reddit hadn’t heard of them, which makes sense. They faded from common use in the 90s. The ones who recognized the coupons were radio hams, which also makes sense. IRCs were widely used by people who made international contacts, including hams…
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Earlier Polistra mused on the consequences of a ‘verb-like’ economic system.
Catholic and Islamic thinkers saw labor as the key component of value. Islam goes farther, declaring that any attempt to place value on abstract numbers (i.e. paying interest) is a sort of idolatry.
Treat everything, animate or inanimate, carpenter or car, as activities instead of things. Treat everything as a source of labor. Why is a carpenter worth money? Because he works for you, doing things you can’t or won’t do. Why is a car worth money? Because it works for you, doing things you can’t or won’t do.
In fact a verb-like monetary unit has been around for a long time, but it quietly died in the US in January of this year. The International Reply Coupon or IRC is still around in most countries. It is pure verb within a narrow realm. One IRC is guaranteed by all participating countries to represent the base cost of sending an airmail letter to another participating country. This is not the same thing as currency exchanges. You always pay the same for an IRC regardless of which country you send it to; and each country must honor an IRC for its own airmail postage regardless of present postage rates or currency values. The action of sending one airmail is the value of the IRC.
I remember the IRC fondly from my ham radio days. If you wanted a ham in Poland to send you a QSL card verifying your contact, you’d send him a QSL of your own along with a couple of IRCs to compensate him for postage. Companies dealing across borders sometimes used IRCs as a universal currency for small amounts: you might send ten IRCs to purchase a magazine.
If we’re ever going to set up a more verbish system, or even a more sane system, post offices would be a good backbone. Most POs ran savings and checking systems, often called Giro. The system disappeared here in 1966, but still works in many countries.
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Sidenote: I get the sense that the PO tried to change a whole bunch of stuff at once in 2013, then had to face reality. House deliveries were supposed to end in 2013, replaced by clusterboxes on each block. Didn’t happen.
Polistra's Mill 