According to Home Media Magazine, "A day after the U.S. Postal Service formally requested 7% to 8% fee increases for mailing DVDs, books and magazines, among other proposals, one of its largest customers — Netflix — has surprisingly come out in favor of the proposed rate hike. The postal service July 6 said it wants to increase the cost of a first-class stamp to 46 cents from 44 cents. The nation’s mail carrier spends more than $20 million annually hand-sorting DVD mailers, with costs expected to increase to $30 million by 2009, according to a published report. The service manually sorts disc mailers for Netflix, Blockbuster Express, GameFly and other by-mail subscription services since sorting machines can’t process them. "Because these mail pieces are not machine-able, the postal service pays significant additional labor costs to manually process them," said Tammy Whitcomb, the deputy assistant inspector general for revenue and systems, in a recent report by The Washington Times."