business is a joy, but do we need it?

The Russian Post reported that its clients from the Moscow region sent more than a million letters using an electronic stamp in the form of a QR code. Digitalization, of course, makes life easier, but in this case it’s somehow sad … But what about romance, but where is the aesthetics, and how, pray tell, should philatelists replenish their collections?

Of course, the use of electronic stamps in Russia instead of conventional ones is no longer a novelty. They started rolling out in 2019. Like a paper stamp, a digital stamp indicates that the customer has paid for the shipment. And it also contains information about the cost of delivery, date, sender and recipient index. But using a QR stamp is faster and more convenient.

The innovation was appreciated by large companies that sent tens of thousands of letters a day, and by the postal workers themselves. Of course, gluing stamps and affixing stamps on so much correspondence is quite a job. Even if you use a free car. And so – I made a request, received a code, printed it on an envelope, and everything was short-lived. In addition, letters with a QR-mark are immediately entered into the mail database, which practically guarantees the delivery of correspondence to the addressee. True, so far only within the Russian Federation.

In general, commercial structures liked QR-marks. And now only in Moscow and the Moscow region, more than 500 business representatives have connected the payment for sending letters using electronic stamps.

Well, well, in some European countries for more than a decade, instead of stamps, you can use codes received in SMS. And nothing.

But still, I don’t want conventional brands to be completely a thing of the past. After all, many probably remember how, when receiving a letter, especially if it came from afar, the first thing they did was examine the stamps, and in order to peel off especially beautiful or valuable ones, they held the envelope over the steam, at the risk of getting burned. And when they themselves wrote a letter, they tried to buy a more interesting stamp, and, having licked its reverse side, they carefully glued it onto the envelope.

By the way, do you know what glue for stamps was made of? At first, it contained wheat and potato starch with the addition of wood glue. Then they began to cook glue from fish and animal bones. Now the glue for stamps does not smell of organic matter. Although it is still harmless to the body. And they also produce stamps, the adhesive side of which is protected by a film that must be removed before use.

True, we have to admit: we have already stopped licking stamps, and the epistolary genre is now developing more and more on the Internet. After all, whatever one may say and no matter what brand you use, letters come by e-mail much faster and more accurately than by regular mail. But still, if you happen to receive a letter from relatives written in the old fashioned way, seeing a stamp on the envelope with the image of some kind of butterfly, Snow Maiden or, for example, the profile of the Sun of Russian poetry is much more pleasant than a faceless QR code. Yes, and you can’t insert an electronic stamp into the stockbook …

Although it is too early for philatelists to get upset – only recently a solemn cancellation of the stamp took place in honor of the 875th anniversary of Moscow. So let’s hope the time of traditional postage stamps is not over yet.

Alena Bodrienko.

Moskovskaya Pravda collage