Za: Waz Dat Bar Code In The Selvage?

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A covers bargain box at NOJEX coughed-up this ZA (South African) Registered Letter Medium stamp ... the lovely 2010 Beadwork.

So what's with that bar code?

Since it was on the cover, with no other registry etiquette, I thought for a moment that it might be the registry / tracking number.

But, since there is a row of perforations between the bar code and the stamp, I began thinking that it might be an inventory control number for that individual sheet or, simpler yet, a point-of-sale bar code for that class of stamps.

Finally, the sun rose, the curtain parted, the light came on, and I thought: Why not ask for directions?

So ... waz dat bar code in the selvage?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who is hoping that he did not make a mistake when he made this a straight post, and not a poll)

Interesting question.
Very common occurence, seen on, I believe, Canada, France, Australia souvenir sheets.



Some answers for Australian Booklets.........

I have never been aware of the difference before,
Australian vendors, particularly, sell, Philatelic, and non-philatelic Barcodes...who knew?

Canadian barcodes differ on philatelic and regular P.O. stock of booklets in Canada also. As well we find barcodes on sheet stamps that were issued here also.

Ironic that we find it on an older sheet stamp of the whale, the so called 9th and final issue of the wildlife series. Now we have another new sheet stamp of the bighorn sheep and it does not have a barcode on it. Odd that they would not put a barcode on it like all other recent issues.

And they do use them at point of sale terminals.

Mike

Here are two versions of "Edouard Vuillard" french souvenir sheet : with number (for subscribers) and with barcode.

Here in The Netherlands the bar codes are simply used to be scanned at the cash register when you are buying stamps at an post office outlet. so scan at point of sale.

Johan.

POS. You can scan the bar code and see for yourself but you do not need to do this for the UPC A bar code in ikey's post (it is a human readable type which shows the encoding). So in POS terminals communicate to the server, the server POS database looks up the UPC number, that numbers contains the item info and price.

Don