Back in the '90s Kevin & Bean of L.A. radio station KROQ pulled a couple of stunts. In one, they decided to see if they could make a potato famous. IIRC, they were ticked because some non-talent bum became an instant celebrity. They said something like, ‘If they can make this guy/girl famous, I’ll bet we can make a potato famous!’ The Potato made its way onto a few sit-coms, which L.A. hipsters noticed. Another thing they did was to make up ‘a word that sounds bad, but really isn’t’. I don’t remember who came up with it; it may have been Jimmy Kimmel, who was on the show as ‘Mr. Bircham’, among other characters, at the time. The word, ‘jackhole’ gained some notoriety.
Wait… I found some cites for the latter:
Anyway…
I wonder what would happen if Kevin & Bean, or some other personalities, managed to spread the idea of sending BRM back to the sender to a huge audience. What if a character on a show as popular as Friends or Seinfeld engaged in this ‘hobby’? If a couple of yahoos from a local radio station can ‘make a potato famous’ and popularise a new ‘swear word’, I think a character on a major television show could innundate junk mailers with BRM.
If you are claiming that returning BREs with no identifying information in them has somehow reduced your junk mail, you are simply deluding yourself. Explain how it could possibly work. Do you think the marketers are psychic?
Personally, I can see getting irate about e-mail spam, junk faxes, and phone solicitations. I find these to be real annoyances and intrusions into my life. I just can’t get so worked up about junk mail, because all I have to do about it is drop it in the recycling bin.
Right. Junk mail is harmless. I hate e-mail spam, junk faxes, and phone solicitations, and if we could find a way to strike back against them, it’d be great.
This does bring up a problem- let us say every Doper decides to start sending back the junk-mail postpaid return mail replies. So BigJunque decides to drop sending them out- and turns to spam, telemarketing or junk faxes instead. Great. :rolleyes:
I always feel OK about getting junk mail. I keep a trash can next to my mailbox, and besides, I imagine that all the Bulk Business Mail (Bulk BM) helps keep the price of stamps down, and… indeed, the post office in business.
In answer to the op: No. You can’t get in trouble for this.
I already said I give my personal information. Usually all the junk letters have my name all over the place to pretend I am a super special person and they wrote me a personal letter addressed to ME (with fake handwriting even, oh the joy!), so that I could benefit from this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase junk I have absolutely no need for, so when I send it back saying I hope they go under in flames they know who I am.
I agree with you, it is less intrusive than any of those forms of direct marketing. But it is an inconvenience and I object to their practices and the purchase of my contact info for marketing purposes. Besides I’m not worked up about it, it’s just that the mass mailers are vulnerable.
Yeah, except that one of the sleazy, underhanded tactics that junk mail senders use is to put great effort into making the envelope look like something important. For example, hawkers of mortgage refinancing love to put things like “Re: Bank of America Loan #xxxxx” or even something that looks like it came from your bank and indicates that you missed a payment. I applied for a trademark last year, and got a number of junk mails that looked for all the world like they came from the USPTO (at least to my untrained eye), and even after opening, it took careful reading to discover that it was from some sleazy outfit trying to sell me trademark protection.
It’s just not always easy to tell junk mail from real mail, and the fear of accidentally throwing away something important makes me err on the side of caution, spending my valuable time opening and scanning through something only to find out it’s junk.
So to some of us, junk mail is a very real annoyance and intrusion and time-waster.
Living in an apartment complex my mailbox is pretty small anyway, and it isn’t exactly right by my apartment. My box gets totally filled with tons of junk mail. If the post office can’t fit everything in with all the junk mail, then I have to go to the post office (or the apt complex office best case) to pick up the rest of it. That is a major annoyance to me.
Word on the street is that businesses hate it when their marketing flyers are seen by too many people. Call a business and tell them that you showed their advertisement to two or three other people and watch how pissed they get.
As a HS student, I do this often. Colleges send me stuff - places I’ve never heard of - and I draw them a comic and send it back. Makes me happy inside.
For years, I sent the original application with my name & address on it (so they’d know who I was) with a large handwritten note on it begging to have my name removed from their mailing lists - This has NEVER worked in my experience.
I read a very knowledgeable article saying that the special USPS rate for returning a BRE only applies AS LONG AS IT STAYS UNDER ONE OUNCE. If a returned piece exceeds one ounce, the USPS charges the full postal rate PLUS a huge premium (like a dollar extra and that was ten years ago) for any BRE that was returned with more than one ounce. As noted by others above, sending a brick or a phone book will not work, but a slightly overweight envelope should get through every time and can rack up tens of thousands of dollars in excess postal costs if enough people did it.
If you return a BRE in anger, weigh it to make sure you stuff it with more than an ounce because that is what REALLY gets their attention!
It’s harder than it looks, though - A full ounce will take some stuffing (figure about four sheets of 8-1/2 x 11" paper). I think that’s why they started making the BRE envelopes smaller.
Those little packs of 3x5" coupon cards that you get in the mail work great because they’re printed on heavier card stock and they usually have more than two ounces worth in each pack, and they fit so neatly in the BRE.
You are getting to them, and those new “CUSTOMER LOCATOR CODES” that Capital One and others are putting on the backs of their envelopes prove it! Those are an attempt to discourage pissed-off recipients from returning the envelopes. I personally doubt that the locator codes even work, but if they’re smart enough to locate you with the locator code… maybe they’ll be smart enough to stop sending you new envelopes to stuff.
You are wrong. The USPS will not forward postage paid envelopes that weigh more than one ounce, they are tossed into the recycle. bucket. They caught onto that scam years ago.
You joined just to post this nonsense on a 7½ year old thread?