So in Germany the minimum wage is about 12€ . The international stamp is 95 cent, so you can send 12 international postcards for one hour of work. But this is whithoug thetaxes on the minimum wage. The standard worker keeps only round about 7.50€ so he can actually only affort 7 stamps for an hour work.
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I think Canada’s price to mail internationally is really high. $2.71 per stamp. The minimum wage in my country currently is $12.75 per hour. So you have to work about 12 minutes to earn enough to mail a letter.
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I have just bought stamps so now I’ve had a sit down and a cuppa to recover let’s look at the prices.
Domestic is $1.10, just over half a litre of petrol.
To New Zealand is $2.50, about a litre of milk depending on where you buy milk.
Asia Pacific is $2.70, box of lasagne sheets (pasta)
USA/Canada is $3.40, half a dozen supermarket own brand eggs.
Europe is $3.50, a 4 pack of soap.
Everywhere else is $3.70, 250g of cherry tomatoes.
Food prices in Australia vary wildly though, so those are “Outskirts of Melbourne” prices, once you get into the more remote places prices go through the roof.
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I’m surprised you only need one cuppa to recover Carolyn!! 
I’m in Canberra…and we probably qualify as a ‘remote place’…even though we are the capital 
. Petrol is pretty much standard at 2:24-2:25/ litre here at the moment. I can save 20 cents per litre if I drive an hour out to Goulburn. That probably wouldn’t make sense economically…but perhaps if I take a lot of jerry cans with me it might 
.
I do know that I’ve been sending a lot more Maxicards. They work out at about $2.40 - $2.50 (total cost) to Germany and the US (which is all I’ve drawn the last six address draws)…it is much easier to swallow than $3.40-$3.50 (PLUS the cost of a buying the postcard…which can take it out to as much as $8.50 per send, in total!!!).
So a maxicard postcard to anywhere in the world comes in at a little less than the cost of one litre of unleaded fuel here (given the fuel seems to keep going up…I expect we may end up paying more than $2.50/litre for fuel, come September…when I think the full excise comes back into play).
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And in terms of minimum wage…in Australia the minimum wage rose to AUD $21.38 per hour from the 1st July.
So one hour of work would get you almost nine maxicards to send or six $3.40-$3.50 stamps to use to send on a random postcard, to the USA or Germany (and you’d still have to pay to buy the actual postcard).
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I had one before I went to the post office, for courage.
I do send a lot of maxis, and the pre-paid cards are a good deal at around $2.20 but I generally don’t send those to people who mention stamps because they don’t have any haha
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I get around that by buying cheap old stamps on eBay and whacking them on the back too. Or even just using a five cent platypus in addition to the prepaid. It’s still a nice stamp. I have also stuck cancelled stamps on the back of a prepaid card too (ones I have received in the mail and have subsequently steamed off). It spins the clerks out at the counter though…when I go to get the card cancelled. I often have to explain why there are cancelled stamps on the back. 
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If I send a naked card in the US, it costs one stick of gum. If I send internationally, I will pay for one item at Dollar Tree, maybe a hairbrush, or a pair of flipflops (thongs depending on your country).
12 international postcards for one hour of work? Wow!
In France it’s only 6.5! The price of stamp is increasong by 10% every year, but not the minimum wage unfortunately…
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I found this comparison interesting, so I tried to make a list of some countries and I tried to calculate. Here is what I found. Here is the number of international stamps (I have priced the farthest destinations when there were different prices) that can be bought by any minimum wage with his monthly salary in each country. I did not put some steps like Switzerland or Finland, because they do not have a minimum wage. If you see some mistake, please tell me, it wasn’t always easy to find the figures.
Albania: 320
Argentina: 71
Armenia: 170
Australia: 928
Belarus: 216
Belgium: 718
Brazil: 425
Bulgaria: 323
Canada: 897
Chile: 648
:china: China: 224 (minimum wage is set locally, so I took the lowest minimum wage. But if I took the highest minimum wage, it would have been 484)
Croatia: 557
Czech Republic: 360
Estonia: 344
France: 972
French Polynesia: 1,136
Germany: 1,736
Greece: 774
Hong Kong: 1,290
Hungary: 287
India: 249
Indonesia: 170 (for the province with the lowest minimum wage. It’s 427 for the province with the highest minimum wage)
Iran: 950
Ireland: 798
Israel: 768
Japan: 2,603
Latvia: 500
Lithuania: 768 (973 until last year, but prices increased in 2022)
Luxembourg: 1,612
Macau: 1,109
Malaysia: 1,222
Malta: 633
North Macedonia: 615
Mexico: 351
Moldova: 252
Montenegro: 562
Netherlands: 1,113
New Zealand: 1,277
Philippines: 775
Poland: 376
Portugal: 783
Romania: 354
Russia: 246 (379 in Moscow)
Serbia: 681
Slovakia: 404
Slovenia: 716
South Africa: 579
South Korea: 6,176
Spain: 536
Sri Lanka: 179
Taiwan: 2,104
Turkey: 275
Ukraine: I found different figures, so I think I should better ask to some Ukrainian postcrossers… Maybe @pollymart? That would be very kind of you 
United Kingdom: 1,013
United States: 897
So, among the countries I listed, it seems that Germany (1,736), Taiwan (2,104), Japan (2,603) and South Korea (6176!!) are the best countries to be a Postcrosser, while it’s much more expansive in Belarus (216), Armenia (170) and Argentina (71).
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@Aguaroble
Thank you for your efforts. This is a very interesting statistic. In Iran, this number is exactly 950.
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Thank you, it’s edited!
Thanks for the question! 
Send 1 postcard costs 1 dollar, send an envelope (up to 50g.) 1.5 dollars. For $1 you can buy a kilo of sugar or 10 eggs + 1/2 bread or 5 rolls of cheap toilet paper.
In Ukraine, the minimum monthly wage is 6,500 UAH. If translated into hours, about 39 UAH per hour. 1 stamp per hour
I consider postcrossing to be an expensive pleasure for us.
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yes!
wow, what a great way to put things into perspective! Thank you for your efforts!
In Romania, after tax you’d be left with a 1524 RON minimum wage (gross minimum wage is 2550 RON this year). Most cards I send are with 6.5 RON postage - for some overseas countries, or even for some closer ones, but with small traffic, I must use 10 RON instead. So that would be 152 to 234 cards a month.
Gas would be 7.5 RON per liter. I could buy 2 bags of sugar (1 kg each) instead of a stamp - but sugar is bad for you, m’kay? :))
Thank you @lamelemon!
But actually, I always took the minimum wage before tax, and as for the postage tarif, I always took the tarif for the most expansive destination, but if it was cheaper not to send in “priority mail”, I chose this tarif. When I went to the Romanian Postal Service website, it was written that it was 6.5 RON for the most expansive destination, but 10 RON for priority letters specifically. That’s why I took 6.5 RON.
But does anyone know why there aren’t that much South Korean postcrossers? And a lot of Belarusian postcrossers?
I mean, around 230,000 postcards have been sent from South Korea (51,300,000 inhabitants, so one postcard for around 223 inhabitants)
Arnd around 2,600,000 postcards have been sent from Belarus (9,400,000 inhabitants, so one postcard for less than 4 inhabitants)
If you compare it to the minimum wage, a Belarusian stamp for abroad is equivalent to (6176/216=28.6) Korean stamps…
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I’m not sure this is accurate. I haven’t checked when I bought stamps in person but online I only pay 5% tax when I order directly from Canada Post. BC has a combined tax rate of 12%. So I think stamps are only charged GST.
So an international stamp would be $2.71 * 1.05 = $2.85
That means in BC one stamp is about 2 liters of gas or two stamps is about one venti pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks.