What’s forever for?
I was shopping for stamps on the Postal Service’s Web site, and for a brief moment I was taken aback by the image at right: this is, yes, the First-Class “Forever” Stamp, and the word FOREVER has a line drawn through it, as though to say “We really don’t mean this.”
And then I looked at some other First-Class stamps, and all of them have their face values marked over in similar fashion. So what I’m seeing, apparently, is a low-level anti-counterfeiting measure: copying the picture and making photocopies thereof is a fairly trivial task, but it’s going to be a pain in the neck for a would-be counterfeiter to haul out Photoshop and clean up that line across the digits.
McGehee »
25 October 2009 · 10:32 am
From what I’ve seen of what happens to edges when you convert an image from any other format to JPEG, even Photoshop might be unable to clean up the stripe completely.
Jeffro »
25 October 2009 · 1:03 pm
Yep, that’s what it’s there for. After you handle thousands of letters a day, the hinky stuff really stands out. When I worked there, I saw reused postage all the time. People would cut out bulk rate stamps, thinking they’d work as first class. If someone got a letter with an uncancelled stamp, they’d cut it out and paste it to the new letter. Pretty easy to spot.
That sort of small time penny pinching never made sense to me – so what if you actually got it to work instead of getting your letter refused. So you saved forty odd cents for how much labor? You’ve gotta be working pretty cheap to save forty four cents.