If you've ever handled a Lego set from a theme other than Creator or BIONICLE, you've almost certainly seen some of the stickers Lego prints to decorate their sets. Lego's Space and Adventure-themed non-licensed sets and their licensed Star Wars, Marvel Superheroes, and DC Superheroes sets are especially likely to have lots of stickers.
Because stickers look so goofy when they aren't on straight, they aren't the most kid-friendly component of any given Lego set. And most AFOL's like printed pieces more than stickers because (a.) stickers can peel off when scuffed around the edges, and (b.) evidently, a lot of AFOL's are a bunch of butterfingers and can't get stickers on straight to save their lives.
Hence the acronym DSS, which stands for "Dreaded Sticker Sheet." Some people have been known to substitute something rather less polite for dreaded in the above acronym. This acronym refers, of course, to the fact that Lego prints its stickers on one or, rarely, two, sheets of sticker surface. Historically they've just been left loose in the box, and as often as not been folded, scuffed badly, or otherwise damaged by the time the box is opened. That has changed some in recent years, however.
Recently, Lego has started packing the instruction manuals for their sets costing over $100, and some that cost less, in plastic folders with a cardboard backer, which keeps the instruction manual from getting bent or having its binding disintegrate. These little packages also hold the sticker sheets, for obvious reasons.
If stickers are such a nuisance, why doesn't Lego just quick making them and switch to all printed parts, like they do with minifigure components? Good question. The answer has to do with manufacturing overhead and the near-collapse of Lego a few years ago.
At the time, the manufacturing departments of the company were complaining loudly about all the new parts they kept being asked to make, because it kept driving their costs higher. Essentially, every Lego plant produces many different shapes and colors of parts, and each time the shape or color is changed the whole line has to be stopped so that the color of plastic can be changed or so that molds can be swapped out. This results in a lot of downtime and sometimes wasted materials, and the more kinds of parts the factories need to produce, the more waste and downtime is incurred and the more expensive the whole business becomes.
The designers resisted calls to simplify their work, claiming that they needed these new elements they were calling for. The manufacturers won the dispute quite handily by showing management some of the new minifigures they were being asked to produce for various sets. The model designers had been designing minifig models of themselves. This illustrated the point rather well, and although the elevated manufacturing costs alone were hardly the entirety of Lego's troubles, the problem was quickly dealt with by adding new standards and oversight to the implementation of "changes."
Every theme, and the company as a whole, has a strict limit on the "changes" that can be implemented in any given year. A "change" is any component that is different, either in shape, color, or printing, from the pieces produced by Lego at that time. Given the choice, a designer would generally rather use the available changes to introduce new parts or colors, unless a given printed part is likely to be useful for more than one set or used in very large numbers, or is one of a few parts that Lego never applies stickers to (the minifig head component is an example of one that has never to my knowledge had a sticker applied to it in an official set). So, instead of producing lots of nice printed parts, the designers, tend to incorporate more stickers to get the fine details they want.
Just about the only thing that annoys an AFOL more than a missing or broken piece in a brand-new set is a sticker that attaches to more than one Lego element. These despicable objects are called STAMP's, which stands for "STickers Across Multiple Parts." You'll find these on old 9-volt Lego Trains, occasional City sets from a least 5 years ago and sometimes on really old Space sets. They are fairly often cut into pieces with craft knives into several smaller stickers, so that you don't have to worry about the STAMP coming off when the model is taken apart and the bricks to which it is attached aren't being held in place next to each other.
Thankfully, there aren't many STAMP's around any more. The backlash from these has been great enough that Lego has found other ways to get around the problem without resorting to those nasty, big pieces of adhesive-coated plastic.
Happy building!
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