Forever stamps present a new challenge for dealers in mint stamps. Here is why.

As of this writing, the postage rate is 46¢. Suppose dealers stock mint stamps of today’s new issues and price them at, say, 70¢. Ten years from now, suppose the postage rate increases to 75¢. If a dealer doesn’t keep bumping their price up a little bit over the next 10 years, eventually their sale price of 70¢ will be below the first class rate of 75¢. Collectors can then buy the stamps “below face value” and use them for postage to save money.

To prevent this from happening, dealers will have to occasionally update the prices on their mint Forever stamps to keep pace with the changing postal rates. This is different than the past when dealers only needed to update their prices when the catalog value changed, or there was a change in demand for a particular issue. Those kinds of changes don’t happen very often for inexpensive, common stamps. Since postal rates are changing about every year or two, dealers are going to update their prices on mint Forever stamps much more frequently.