Hello everybody. Mainly for those in the UK…
If you mention postage stamps changing, most people think of the change to King Charles III heads on our stamps and coins. Now that’s going to be a gradual change, and The King will face the opposite way from The Queen. Apparently this is the custom. Who knew? But you don’t need to worry about this yet, if at all…
There is another much more urgent change to Royal Mail postage stamps that many are unaware of:
From 31 January you will no longer be able to use old style stamps without a barcode on.
So you need to use up your existing stamp stock pronto, or you can swap them out for new ones with barcodes on as I have started to do. You cannot swap them in branches of the post office itself, oh no, that would be far too logical for today’s potty society. No, you have to fill in a Stamp Swapout Form to send off and swap up to £200. worth of stamps. There is another form for a higher value than this but you have to pay postage sending them this way so I’m doing mine in batches the Freepost way. The form is linked on this website. You might wonder why I have so many leftover stamps and the answer is I used to do surveys testing the post office service and I was paid in books of stamps. I did it for a few years and accumulated more than I could use immediately.
Why do we need these larger stamps with barcodes added anyway? You might think that it is to make the sending of letters more efficient but again that would be logical and the world is not. No, my friends, it seems to be more about the ability to send an attached video message via the barcode on your stamp eg to say Happy Birthday to someone. Why you wouldn’t just send a What’s app or text to do this I have no idea. I personally have never wished my postage stamps to be more interactive. The current message on the barcode is apparently Shaun the Sheep, if you are interested.
Your stamps without bar codes will no longer be valid after 31 January 2023, so get the form and get swapping my friends. Either that or extend your Christmas card list to some random people you happen to have addresses for eg someone you sold something to on eBay?? The tax man??! Your local pub landlord? Estate agent?! 🤣
The second Waffle tip of the day and much more exciting is that the Wimbledon tennis ticket ballot has opened today. So happy. I love Wimbledon. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. Please don’t enter the ballot. All the more chance for me! 🎾🍓🍹.
The Windsor Waffle 
Not in the UK but still found this interesting – sounds like they can make something a little more complicated anywhere :)..glad you’ll be able to swap the stamps out by mail.
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Indeed. The world has gone mad!!! 🙃
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Yes, I am aware of this some months ago regarding the change to come with the stamps. But I didn’t know what the barcode was all about and like you, it can be sent another way than in a barcode. So not something I will be bothering with either.
When I read that stamps couldn’t be swapped at the Post Office, I thought, yeah, don’t make it an easy way to do it. 😁
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