Talk About Petty… Why This Landlord Decided To Up Rent By ONE Penny

This has to be the definition of “petty”.

To cut a not-so-long story even shorter, the price of stamps went up by one penny in the States last week. One person who’s been finding it tough to cope is the landlord at this lady Layla’s apartment complex.

They’ve raised everybody’s rent by one penny to compensate for the postage change and they chose to notify everyone by, well, hand-delivering a letter to their doors.

Layla wrote to American website Consumerist.com:

I’m a resident of [redacted], Maryland, and yesterday I found the attached letter at my door. In short, to compensate for the recent $.01 increase in stamp prices, our rent will be increasing $.01 to cover the cost of mailing the bill. I have no idea if such spontaneous rent increases are even legal (all the information on rent increases I can find is on increases when renewing a lease, which is not the case here) or where to log a complaint, if they are not.

I also seriously wonder how it is even cost effective to take the time to write, print, and deliver letters in order to collect 1 cent extra, per month. To the best of my knowledge, they do not offer leases longer than 12 months, so the maximum benefit is 11 cents. The average benefit has to be significantly lower.

At least they didn’t use 46-cent stamp on every one of the letters. Depending on the layout of the complex, though, it might have cost even more in the long run to send someone around to deliver them.

Layla sounds pee-ed off and a bit baffled. We would be too…