It's really up to you, he's trading a 1:1 value (shipping aside), in my opinion this is a method of cold storage or, as you said, face-to-face trading. (Possibly not face-to-face, if the trades sole purpose was to hide the exchange of a large number of bitcoins, eg. dark net trade.)
If used for transferring bitcoin, it would be awesome if we could send money to the address on the coin. Why is only the first 8 digits on there?
You could try first bits.