Royal Mail’s new barcode stamps are a very creepy imposition

In this dawn of the reign of King Charles III, while the country waits excitedly for new postage stamps with the King’s head on them, the Royal Mail appears to have other priorities. In its obsession with tracking and de-romanticising everything, it is imposing new stamps on us which manage to be both antiquated (they still have the Queen’s head on them) and creepily digital.

A barcode runs down their right-hand side. This enlarges them by a third, thus making them harder to squeeze onto the top corner of a small envelope, especially if you need two or three of them. Our late Queen, facing leftwards, is turning away from the barcode, and you can almost sense her disdain at the very thought of it. The King, poor man, will be facing the barcode head-on, in accordance with the tradition that monarchs on postage stamps alternate their direction of view.

The well-organised letter-writers of this country, meanwhile, who like to buy pages of stamps at a time to last them the year, insuring themselves against mid-year stamp-price-hikes, must swap their current hoard for the new kind, because all non-pictorial non-bar-coded stamps will be invalid from January 31 2023. To do this swapping involves printing out and filling in a digital “Stamp Swap Out” form. It’s enough to send the non-technically minded members of the population, or those without internet access – the real letter-writers, in other words, who keep the Royal Mail going with their preference for postcards over emails – into a headache-inducing spin of anxiety.

Predictably, the transition has been far from smooth. “We aim to process your application within seven working days, but this cannot be guaranteed,” the Royal Mail’s form says. But a Classics teacher friend of mine, Ed Clarke, who takes pride in sending his books and posters out by post, and keeps a hoard of stamps at home to do so, has not heard a squeak since submitting his Swap Out form a while back, enclosing all his stamps that will now go to landfill. A hundred million stamps will suddenly become invalid on January 31.

“They just would make our old stamps obsolete in January,” one exasperated person tweeted, “just when everyone has stamps left over from Christmas!” Another said: “What’s next? Barcodes on the backs of coins?” It will be interesting to see whether, this Advent, we receive more cards than last year, as people frantically use up their stamps before they go out of date, or fewer, as sending of cards has become absurdly expensive, with first class stamps at 95p on top of the price of the cards themselves.

The Royal Mail’s bright idea is that, with this new barcode, every stamp will now have its “digital twin”, and that if we download the Royal Mail app, anyone sending stamped mail will be able to choose which video the recipient can see when they receive a letter from us. To get us into the mood, the Royal Mail has put a Shaun the Sheep video on its app, so any receiver of a barcoded stamp can watch “Shaun and his flock in a mischievous and amusing encounter with Rita, a hard-working Royal Mail postie”.

Which of course, no one in their right minds has any desire to do. A handwritten letter or card is a joyful thing in its own right, and has no need of an accompanying video, or a barcode, or an app.