Have you ever found out that something you remember from your youth is now gone, and you didn’t even notice? If you are a certain age, you might feel that way when I deliver the news: You haven’t been able to buy International Reply Coupons (IRCs) at a US Post Office since early 2013. By the end of 2026, you won’t be able to buy them anywhere. The age of the IRC is over.
What’s an IRC?
If that didn’t mean anything to you, you might be too young to remember, or maybe you just weren’t into shortwave listening or ham radio. Although there were other reasons to get IRCs, a radio hobby is the most likely reason a Hackday reader would have bought an IRC.
For radio purposes, here’s the problem. You’ve worked on your station for months, and one winter night, you finally pull in that rare station from Luxembourg. They’ll send you a QSL card to verify that you heard them. You only have to send them a letter telling them what time you heard them, what frequency, and some details about the program you heard. But they probably don’t want to pay the postage required to send hundreds or thousands of cards overseas.
While this is a radio-specific problem, you might find the same issue with pen pals or when trying to buy things from an overseas company.
SASE
If everyone were in the same country, the solution would be easy. Take a stamp, put it on an envelope that has your address on it, and stuff it in with the letter. Or, you could just drop a stamp or two in the letter you sent.
The problem is, US postage won’t help Radio Luxembourg. On the other hand, the effort required for you to buy postage that works in Luxembourg would have been a nightmare.
Enter the UPU
The Universal Postal Union is a UN agency that is effectively an association of post offices in 192 countries. Their charter is to facilitate mailing things worldwide.
The IRCs date back to 1906. The idea is you buy an IRC at your post office. You send it to Radio Luxembourg, or wherever. There, the mail person at the radio station could go to their post office and trade the coupon for enough local postage to send a surface letter worldwide.
Slow Death
As demand has dwindled, post offices worldwide have quit selling IRCs. As of last year, Australia still did. But Germany, Britain, the United States, and many other countries gave up on them long ago. In fact, Britain’s Royal Mail claimed that the average post office sold less than one IRC per year at the time it threw in the towel.
UPU decided to end IRCs altogether by December 31, 2026. The end of an era and, apparently, not just for radio hobbyists. It is telling that the UPU’s recent editions of IRCs had print runs of 1,000 or even 500. So they obviously weren’t selling very many.
IRCs Other Claim to Fame
If you’ve heard of these before and you aren’t interested in radio, then it might have been in economic history. Have you heard of the Ponzi scheme? It has become a generic term for any business scheme that relies on raising money from new investors to service debt owed to old investors.
However, the original Ponzi scheme dates back to 1920, when Charles Ponzi realized he could buy IRCs in a country where they were cheap and sell them for more in another country. He was happy to accept investors, of course.
The problem is that profits are thin, and the costs of acquiring and transporting large numbers of IRCs quickly swamp most potential profits. Fluctuations in currency exchange rates take the rest.
Goodbye!
So the end of the IRC marks a closed chapter for ham radio and swindling. There were probably other uses, too, that are now consumed by electronic mail, payment systems, and the like.
You have to wonder what adventures IRCs went on during their global travels. The video below shows one’s story.
In the Amateur Radio world they were supplanted by so-called ‘green stamps’ (US $1 bills) long before they were withdrawn by the Post Office.
Yuck! Yeah, unfortunately. I know of a German ham who used them because IRCs were so hard to get by.
About 20 years ago, IRCs had to be ordered online, if I remember correctly.
Because local postal offices nolonger had them in stock.
It was still possible to get them, but very difficult and bureaucratic.
$1 won’t get you near an international letter these days.
You need at least $2 in Luxembourg to buy a postcard stamp, $3 in some other countries.
But then a dollar bill in western Europe is mostly just a piece of green paper. No business or bank would take that, so you’d need at least $20 to walk into a Travelex or similar, often paying a 10% fee.
Back before Covid (maybe 2018 or so), postage for any parcels from China to the US was highly subsidized (I don’t recall if it was by us or by China) and you’d see all sorts of things on Ebay for $0.99 (the minimum Ebay allowed. Sometimes they’d price things in Canadian dollars but shipping to the US, so the price might be US$0.89 or such.
AliExpress didn’t have such a limit, and I searched for something ridiculously cheap. I found a pink LED sold as a car dashboard backlight LED. I had absolutely no need for it but just wanted to see if they’d actually sell and ship a single one. Then I kind of forgot about it until about two months later, when it arrived.
Total cost? It was either US$0.11 or US$0.l13 (I forgot which.) In 2018, it cost either US$0.34 or US$0.l35 (there was a price increase that year) to just mail a postcard domestically. So I could have had three of these LEDs, shipped separately or together (it was listed as “free shipping”) for around the cost to mail a postcard.
Currently, bulk-mail postcards are around UD$0.25-0.35 to mail, and that doesn’t count the cost of the post card itself. So in 2018, it may have been closer to the US$0.15-0.25 range. And that doesn’t even cover the cost and labor for the postcard itself.
No matter how you look at it, I got a usable product, shipped from China, for much less than that postcard.
There’s a US-only version of this called Share Mail. It still exists. Look it up. How it’s marketed is so wild you won’t believe it.
I hate putting corrections in the comments – it looks like I’m having a go at the author, which I’m not – but there isn’t an official Corrections link, or is there?
In the “Slow Death” paragraph there are two bloopers:
“Britain’s Royal Post…” –> it’s “Royal Mail” or “the Post Office”, but not “Royal Post”.
“The end of an ear…” –> I never knew that Vincent Van Gogh used IRCs. Perhaps you meant to type “era”? :)
It could be the end of an ear ;-)
lol
Fixed.
I thought this was going to be about Internet Relay Chat
TLA strikes again!?!
What’s the Texas Library Association got tondo with it?
Love learning about topics I’d not heard of before. Thanks for writing this up, Al!
I learnt about this service like 2 decades ago, when NASA offer a CD-ROM with the transcripts of lunar missions.
So I went to the post office here in Argentina to buy that “stamp” and it took a while for the employee to finally find it and finish the sale.
I then put the stamp in an envelope and sent to NASA. Several weeks later the CD arrived as expected.
Still in one of my drawers…
Interesting! Was there anything from the NASA CD that stood out to you as particularly noteworthy? I ask because this sounds like (maybe?) an excellent birthday gift idea for two people I know.
Hi, sorry for the late reply… Hopefully that birthday present is still on time.
I guess the most iconic sentence you’ll find is:
“Okay, Houston … we’ve had a problem here” from Apollo XIII mission
You may want to check as it seems that NASA is not longer providing the CD set although they could be sourced from some other sites
I thought you’re talking about QSL cards. Saw some of them in my youth.