Weekly Roundup: Are PhotoStamps Signs Of Excess?

The other night I mentioned to my fiancée that we could sign up for Stamps.com’s free 4 week trial and get $25 in postage, a digital scale, and $5 in supplies (the paper the stamps get printed on). $25 means we can send out over sixty letters absolutely free, but the only thing she cared about was whether those stamps would have the ugly bar code on it (yes it would, but I don’t think that barcode is ugly). I acquiesced, because $25 isn’t really worth the hassle and I already have a free scale from when I took advantage of this offer back in college, but that got me thinking about the USPS’s recent push of PhotoStamps at the post offices I’ve been to.

If the bar codes aren’t worth getting 60 letters for free, does putting a picture next to it make it worth paying $XXXX on top of the postage? So far, of the five or six invitations/save the date’s we’ve received, only one has used PhotoStamps and I honestly didn’t think anything of the stamps (I mean they were obviously a nice touch, but I’m someone who wouldn’t mind bar codes… a stamp is a stamp is a stamp).

What do you all think of PhotoStamps? Cute and worth the cost? A sign of minor excess?

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