Readers who haven’t ordered personalized stamps featuring photos of their loved ones, prized possessions or former vice president Spiro Agnew yet are out of luck: Stamps.com, a privately held firm, voluntarily ended PhotoStamps, a joint offering with the U.S. Postal Service. The program allowed customers to upload personal photographs onto live postage stamps.
What got the program pulled was the discovery that controversial images, such as Monica Lewinsky’s little blue dress; former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who is facing a war crimes trial; executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; and Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s high school yearbook picture made it through Stamps.com’s screening process.
Before ending the program, Stamps.com initially ruled that images of teenagers and adults were verboten. It did allow images of babies, children, plants and animals, landscapes, vehicles, and business or charity logos.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Obviously pornographic or scatological images were a no-go, which is fine. But limiting any human image cut out a lot of very important prospective markets.
The prices for PhotoStamps started at $16.99 for a single sheet of 20 first-class (37 cent) stamps, or 85 cents per stamp. In the best-case scenario — an order of 500 sheets — the cost dropped to 60 cents per stamp. That’s 23 cents above the normal first-class price — a premium that probably eliminated most direct mailers as potential PhotoStamps customers.
But it’s not such a high cost for adults with something to commemorate. Forget the high school graduation, bar/bat mitzvah, confirmation and adult birthday markets. The PhotoStamps program was a natural for wedding announcements and reply cards. A nearlywed couple that has gone all out for the sterling sliver fish forks at every place setting isn’t going to balk at a 50-cent premium for putting their affection on their invitations.
At a time when first-class mail use has been declining, and is facing further declines in the years to come, if a few miscreants want to spend more than twice the cost of a stamp to put controversial figures on ’em, power to them.
Yes, the potential for abuse was there. But unlike mass media, the number of people who are going to be exposed to these images is relatively small — the sender, the recipient, and a few postal employees along the way. And I doubt that most letter carriers have the time — or the inclination — to scrutinize stamps on every letter they carry carefully enough to be offended.
Furthermore, where does one draw the line? Vehicle images were permitted under the revised program, but the grillwork of a 1959 Ford Edsel is as potentially offensive as anything Stamps.com nixed. (Look it up and see for yourself.)
There are some legitimate concerns: A Jewish organization might be subjected to letters featuring Hitler stamps from sickos, for instance. But there are already protections against this — harassment laws exist, and intentional infliction of emotional distress is one of those happy little phrases attorneys love to toss into lawsuits.
Folks, absent prior knowledge, Monica Lewinsky’s dress looks like any other nice navy dress. It was even neatly placed on a hanger, which for anyone with teenagers could be taken as an inspirational message. The Rosenbergs look like a pleasant couple from the time when people routinely wore hats.
So Stamps.com loses a moneymaking opportunity (and it was: By the time the program was yanked more than one million stamps had been sold). Our industry, which needs an increase in first-class mail to generate as much revenue for the USPS as possible in order to offset a rate increase, loses as well. And consumers wanting something nifty that sets traditional mail apart from e-mail lose too.
All over a photo of a little blue dress? Give me a break.
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Having spelled Milosevic and Kaczynski correctly in this column (I hope!) I have to ‘fess up to misspelling the name of the obsessive collector brothers I mentioned two weeks ago. They were the Collyer Brothers. I salute the reader who pointed this out — she is clearly more up on her New York eccentrics than I am.
Incidentally, it is a little-known fact that famed TV canine hero Lassie compulsively hoarded whatever socks little Timmy was wearing every time he was rescued. This is how we know Lassie’s breed — she was a border Collyer.
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