Stamps

The trouble with making stamp ink from unicorn blood is that they are so commonly needed, but unicorn blood is so very rare. While it's true that only a drop of the blood is needed for each vat of ink, the price of even such a small amount is so high that it becomes astoundingly expensive to get even a single rubber-stamp on any official document.

In the government offices the cost is partially subsidized, of course, so the price is usually only about 100 kč, but in the private sector, such as banks, it can be much higher. For example, I myself was just yesterday in my friendly neighborhood branch of Raiffeisen, where my paychecks are deposited each month, and I needed an official printed bank statement for the foreigner police with a stamp on it to prove I hadn't forged it. I knew that such a service could hardly be free, what with the cost of that single sheet of paper, the power to run the printer, and the eighteen seconds that the clerk at the desk had to work to print it out for me, but I had forgotten to take into account the unicorn blood in the stamp. The woman told me that I could print one for free from my online banking page, but if I wanted that stamp, it was going to be 300 kč.

Alas, I don't see what other choice the bank had other than to charge me the full cost of the ink in that stamp - especially since she had to use it twice, stamping both sides of the paper.

Perhaps the solution is that the government stop mandating that all stamps contain traces of unicorn blood. No one likes the fees that banks have to charge for each small service rendered, least of all the bank owners themselves, but as long as this prohibitive regulation is enforced, what else can they do?