Well, it would’ve been difficult, but there was still a chance.
On January 22, the cost of sending a letter by first-class mail rose from 44 cents to 45 cents. A small 1 cent increase, but you could’ve exploited it. For a small 2.27% return on investment.
Since the post office sells “forever stamps” at the current first-class postage rate that will forever (well, as long as the U.S. Postal Service exists) be good for the first-class postage rate whenever they’re used, you could have bought forever stamps at 44 cents apiece before January 22, 2012. But after that date, they’re worth 45 cents each.
So that means that, had you bought 100 million forever stamps at 44 cents each (for $44 million), they would suddenly be worth $45 million after January 22. You’ve made a million dollars!
That is, if you could actually find enough people willing to buy all these stamps from you for 45 cents each. Presumably, the buyers would have to be local, or else why would they pay for shipping when they could just go to the post office themselves to buy them at the same price? And how many stamps do people even buy at once? Even if each person bought 100 stamps, that’s still a million people you’d have to sell these stamps to.
So I suppose I should’ve titled this post “You Could Have Made a Million Dollars Last Month if You Had 44 Million Dollars and Can Sell a Hundred Million Stamps.” I guess making a million dollars is never easy…