Expensive postcards in your country?

hello,

i would like to know what postcards are expensive / costly in your country. perhaps you happen to be curious too?

in japan, shaped cards are generally costly, around 200 yen or more.

Gotochi shaped cards are costly too, nearly 200 yen each. it is not that every post office sells them, for example, my local post offices do not carry them, so i need to go to all the way to downtown, where i do not visit much. 400 yen more for the public transportation needed.

shaped cards generally have to be sent in an envelope from japan, the postage to send abroad for the bigger irregular ones is 220 - 300 yen.

edited to add:
i totally forgot about 3D ones, it costs about 500 yen each, the most expensive !!

how about in your country?

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Some normal postcards in shops here are already 1,90€ (about 240 yen), some 1,60€.
Postage is 1,95€ to other countries, with Priority mail. 1,85€ with Economy mail.
Postcards from museum can be even 3 Euros.
Some round cards are 2,50€.

If I use public transport to go buy my card from a bookshop, it costs 6,60€

So, if I would go by bus, buy one normal price card and postage, it’ll cost over 10 Euros (over 1300 yen) (I never do this).

I remember sometimes halfly joking at the Finnish forum, why no one offers me two cards if I send one :grin: (at that time people offered two cards in exchange for Gototchi, because they were so expensive).

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In the US the 3d cards are $3 or more, about 6x the price of a normal tourist type card

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I thonk I won’t complain anymore about our prices. Touristpostcards are often between 1 euro and 1,50 (about 139 and 195 yen) but if you know the right place where to buy the same cards you can buy 10 cards for 5 euro or even less.
Other postcards are also between 1 euro and 1,50. Ofcourse there are also more expensive ones for special series.
Postage is 1,55 for outside the Netherlands. There’s no difference if you sent them with or without envelope.

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I bet you heard of Tausendschön postcards already, these can be up to €2 to buy, but other cards can cost that much, too. Sending them is the normal rate, though.
Square shaped cards cost more to send, €3.70 internationally in contrast to €0.95 for normal cards. And we can’t send special shapes at all.

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Here in Belgium the most expensive I have bought are 3D cards and wooden cards. They cost 3,95 euro

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Depending on where I buy postcards from in my part of Australia, I can spend anywhere from 50c (40 yen) up to more than $3 (245 yen) per card. The cheaper cards are usually part of a deal, like buy 10 cards for $5 or buy a series of cards in a box, that type of thing. The more expensive cards are usually by artists, in museums, in independent bookshops, etc. Add international postage to that (anywhere between $2.50 and $3.70 - 204 yen to 302 yen) and the cost of sending one postcard can get quite expensive! Prepaid postcards in Australia only cost $2.40 (196 yen) and maxicard prices can often (but not always) be cheaper than that, so you may end up with a prepaid postcard or a maxicard from an Australian postcrosser rather than a “standard” postcard with a stamp on it, due to the cost.

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Hi Tuulia

No joke, I would offer 2 cards for one of yours :wink:
just send me a PM, if you are interested

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:smiley: you’re to sweet!
But in reality, I think one for one is fair, or shaped for shaped etc.

But happy lunch break, I noticed nice square cards from recycled paper for 1,80 €. I was prepared to see higher price. A lady next to me looked at them and sighed, why they look like waste, but I like the look, it’s not clear white and not glossy. I don’t remember seen like this before here.

Edit. Here sending square or shaped is the same as normal postcard, so that’s good!
The 3,70€ in German sounds so expensive, just because of the shape.

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Like @Axolotl_ said Tausendschön cards are really expensive to buy. I know stores that sell them for 1 Euros, most stores I see them at seel them for 1,50 Euros but 2 Euros is not seldom for those cards as well.

In comparison: Other non touristic cards here are about 1 Euro sometimes a little bit more expensive. Touristic cards how ever - depending on where you buy them are 30 cents up to more than 1 Euro. 3D cards are more expensive as well. I have seen them sold for more than 3 Euros.

So I try not to buy ordinary Touristic postcards for more than 50 cents each. Exeptions are the so called Hot Spot cards - here I pay up to 1 Euro per card but the more expensive ones I don’t buy.

For non touristic postcards I do not pay more than 1 Euro per card.

These are my methods to limit myself not to spend too much money for a card.

@S_Tuulia 3,70 Euros for the shape card really is expensive in Germany when you compare the 95 cents you would usually pay to send a postcard abroad.

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:poland: Postcards themselves are relatively cheap in Poland.
Regular tourist cards cost about 25 cents, or 50 cents when you buy them in a tourist trap. I can get original vintage cards (post WW II) on the internet at about 1 Euro, and even high-quality art cards cost only 1,50 Euro or less. :slight_smile:
It’s postage that makes our hobby expensive here in Poland, because sending those cards abroad costs 2 Euros. :frowning:

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Here in the US cards can be priced all over the spectrum.

If I go to a local pharmacy I can get tourist cards at around 60 cents each (~66 yen or 0.5 Euro). Nicer cards at stationary stores or a museum might be $1 - $3 (2.5 Euros) and unusual cards like wooden or 3-D would have to be bought on-line (eBay, Etsy) and might be $3-5 each plus shipping cost which might be another $3-4.

But I will often cruise Amazon or eBay for older postcard books or sets and then get 20-100 cards at a time and the cost per card may be as low as 15-30 cents per card. These will take time to arrive, of course, but they will more likely be unique collections. I have gotten black&white photo sets of gal pals from the 1940s, a set of lighthouses (only a few years out of date) and a set of Rube Goldberg machines which I can’t wait to put up on my Flickr site, since I’ve never seen another Postcrosser with that in their collections :grinning:

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@Ludek
i hear the postage to abroad from Poland is the most expensive in Europe. 8 zloty now. too expensive.

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I’m happy to understand that postcards in Russia are quite cheap - start by 7 roubles (about 0,08€) and up to 50 (0,57€) or little more. I’ve also seen some expensive card like Inge Löök for 140 roubles - about 1,6€.

Some city views cards are little cheaper sometimes, I’ve bought them from publisher, set of 16 cards costed 57 roubles (0,64€, so it’s 0,04€ per card!) and set of 32 cards about 150 roubles (1,70€). I’ve also bought some museums set not directly in museum, but from publisher, so it wasn’t expensive.

But all these cards are the same and you all have seen them lots of times, so I usually try to find smth non typical and not a Blue cats :slight_smile:

Surely we have expensive cards - up to 2-3€ per postcard in museums or by local artists. Sets usually are much more cheaper. I’ve seen lenticular card that costed about 300 roubles - 3,4€.

Postage is 18 Roubles (0,20€) for domestic postcard, 24 roubles (0,27€) for letters, 52 roubles (0,6€) international Surface cards/letters up to 20gr and 58 (0,66€) airmail. But usually Surface and airmail takes the same time, I’m not sure if they’re sorted by types by Russian post. I send all my international cards with Surface - mostly it takes about 2 weeks! Postcards and envelopes cost the same, so if you want envelope form Russian member - feel free to ask!

Unfortunately, Russian post is cheap, but very unreliable and quite slow :slight_smile: so… low prices - low speed :slight_smile:
i’ve sent some cards from Germany on vacation and was surprised that it takes 2 days to another country! I’d be happy if my postbox would be emptied in two days by our post, sometimes I put card and hear that there’s a lot of mail in this box, so I’m not sure that the mail is taken from this box on daily basis :slight_smile:

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Yes and no. The postage is 8 zloty here, but that’s not the most expensive in Europe. Recently received a postcard from Denmark with a 33-kroner stamp. :denmark: I checked how much that was, and it turned out Danish postcrossers actually pay much much more than we - a staggering 20 zloty or 5 Euro!!! :frowning:

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In India we are getting the cards as cheep as for ₹0.25 paise ($0.0034, €0.0028). It may be surprise, but still it is available in the ASI counters. Interesting part of this postcard is, It is a UNESCO heritage site.

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As @TwasBrillig pointed out, prices for postcards are all over the place here in the US. It really depends on where you look. I was chatting with my postcard wholesale source earlier in the week. We both agreed that finding good postcards at the retail level is very difficult.

That being so, the sources for good quality cards are often found online. If I may say so, I currently have up for bid 100 good quality, modern United States viewcards up for bid starting @ $0.15 card. These are perfect for Official Postcrossing, Swaps, tags, RRs or the general collector. In my store, I have many nice topical cards (Maps & Lighthouses) available too.

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Here in Switzerland most cards are between CHF 1.50 and CHF 3.00 (around 180 to 360 yen). I prefer to get mine at secondhand stores, where the choice is limited to what happens to be available that week, but the cost is much lower at CHF 0.30 (around 36 yen). Sometimes I find sets that are even cheaper - I just stopped by this week and found a total of 330 cards in four sets for CHF 0.05 per card (6 yen).

Maybe there are secondhand stores near you that stock postcards? It can be time-consuming, but also good fun. A bit like a treasure hunt :slightly_smiling_face:

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A popular series often requested from the US are the state postcards from LouPaper; these are $2 (ÂĄ220) each (plus shipping, since as far as I know, they are only available online).

I understand why people like them–they’re lovely! My main objection to buying them is extremely petty: misspellings of state icons. On the Washington card, for example, Pike Place should not be written as “Pike’s Place”–in fact, an artist hilariously created this postcard in protest. :joy:

The state crab of Oregon suffered the same fate. :broken_heart: [Edited to update: the crab has been fixed. :white_check_mark:]

Other specialty cards printed by individual artists can be as much as $3-5 (ÂĄ330-550) each. :confounded:

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Wow…I consider postcards that cost more than 1€ as expensive. So I usually won’t buy them.

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