\address{Disgruntled recipient of unsolicited surface mail \
123 Main Street \
State of Frustration USA 54321}
\signature{biqu}
\date{}
\begin{letter}{ATTN: Marketing Department \
P.O. Box 00000 \
Anywhere USA 00000}
\opening{Dear Marketing Department:}
The recent arrival of your company’s catalog in my mailbox was most
unwelcome. It frustrates me that businesses resort to such invasive
tactics as gleaning addresses of potential customers and flooding their
mailboxes with sales pitches for the wasteful and overvalued products of
the extravagant consumer culture to which our zeal for unchecked
capitalism has led us.
I am unaware of any previous business relationship that would have led
you to regard my mailbox as a lucrative target for your direct marketing
campaign. Please delete my address from your database of potential
customers, and inform the companies with whom you share mailing lists to
do the same.
The author of the OP hereby releases the contents of the above letter into the public domain. Feel free to copy and modify for your own purposes. A sample of the typeset output produced by LaTeX from a slightly different input file can be found on this page.
If it really was that easy. I hope you shred forms that have your name, address and other personal info that are contained credit card forms, catalog sales order sheets, mortgage apps that have your loan amount on them, etc, etc, etc.
It’s called a shredder, and you can get them from Office Depot. The pages with any personal info, along with credit card apps and the like, go into the same garbage bag that has the cat crap from our four litter boxes, which is then tossed down the trash chute into the compactor. If an enterprising identity thief can get past all that, I deserve to get ripped off.
Yeah, and the burden should be on ME to make sure the post office doesnt deliver or someone picks up my mail when I’m on vacation, so that the box has room for legitimate mail.
After all, by having a street address, it means I want snail spam.
As a last resort, yes. But environmental responsibility encompasses more than just recycling. Before recycling, we should determine whether we could reuse the unwanted material, since reusing materials does not require as much energy as recycling them. (In the case of unsolicited catalogs, appropriate options for reuse might include origami or confetti.) Even before reusing materials, however, we should try to reduce their quantity to begin with, so that the resources that would have been used wastefully can be directed toward more salubrious ends. Hence the “Three R’s” that schoolchildren are taught regarding environmental responsibility:
Well… yes. If you want to receive the services of the Post Office, having items delivered daily to your home, then you have to accept bulk mail too. Bulk mail items are a big part of what keeps your postman delivering daily, it’s regular business, and pays well. Take that away, and the paltry amount of “real” mail left won’t cover the cost to deliver it.
I’m lucky if I get one honest to goodness real piece of mail a day. Generally I get a few bills, some paychecks, and a couple of odd pieces here and there, that’s about it for the month. $0.30 is not going to pay for my mailman, his office, the cross country transport and the pickup of that letter, certainly not for him to show up every day. Cut out bulk mail… but don’t complain about your new Mon. Wed. Fri. delivery days.
Bulk mail is in direct contrast to Telemarketing and Spam, in that it actually helps to fund a valued service, rather than abusing a valued service.
Just in case that last seems too harsh, I actually sympathize with the OP. I once collected every credit card solicitation I received for a year, from November 2001 to November 2002. Ended up with a stack of mail a foot high. The mind (well, my tiny reptilian one at least) boggles.
Well, I’ll always flip through a new catalog, but I hate credit card offers. chuckle
I actually enjoy when I buy something from a store online, cause for the next few months, I tend to get all sorts of cool catalogs to look at. It’s like window shopping without all the walking!
Now, I’m not against most direct mail because, as others have said, it pays its way. But I am against the weekly ad rolls that are about 20 sheets of newspaper stock, and that do not stop sending me them even when I request them to do so. If I can’t get them to not deliver it to me (which I purposely do not read, other than to see if a piece of real mail has been stuck inside it,) and take a vacation for a couple weeks, there might not be any room in my mailbox for real mail. The burden shouldnt be on me to avoid people who spam me (and at the point of their ignoring my request to stop, I’m sorry, it’s spam.)
My grandmother was addicted to mail and would open and entertain all offers sent. Much of it went to the fireplace, but anyone asking for money (Paralyzed Veterans of America, March of Dimes, American Cancer Society) would receive two bucks cash whether they sent “seals”, calendars, address labels, or holiday cards. Grampa loved her so he diligently dropped all the junk mail on her end of the table for her to deal with as she saw fit.
Then she died.
I moved in a few months later and it fell to me to cancel all her shit. Most of them fell by the wayside except this one, and it was the magazine company that puts out such titles as Reminisce and Country Woman and Quick Cooking. Eighteen months later after dozens of RFP requests they finally sent a letter addressed to gramma which started off with “We know we’re persistent…”
I highlighted that part of the letter and wrote the following in the margin: “You are persistent. She is dead. She wins. PLEASE remove her from your mailing list.”
And there was peace in the village.
If anyone can find a method that will get rid of stand-alone newspaper circulars as easily as that please let me know. I’m awfully tired of Shopko circulars and Realtor buy-a-house-now ads in my mailbox. Think of the trees, you bastards!
