It seems easy enough these days for any company under the sun to acquire plump spam mailing lists. Let’s say I wanted to send a note for my personal amusement to every residential address in the U.S. How would I go about acquiring the lists, and what would be the most efficient way of preparing all the spam… err, letters? I imagine I could outsource the envelope stuffing part if it needs to be done by actual humans, although I’d be surprised if they didn’t have machines these days that can do the whole process of addressing/applying postage, stuffing, sealing, and dropping the letters somewhere. How much would all this cost? I’m rich (in this hypothetical scenario), so it doesn’t matter too much but I’m curious.
Note: I have no intention of actually doing this, of course.
Obviously I don’t know about the USA, but here in the UK you pay the Post Office a standard rate and they will deliver a letter to every house in the UK (or a specific area of the UK).
Same same in Canada, although it will not deliver to those who have opted out.
I obviously don’t know how the process works if you are sending to a very large area, but when we send out election literature to every house in our electoral district, we simply choose whatever Forward Sortation Areas we want (the first three characters of the postal code), as well as any Letter Carrier Walks er want within the FSA if we only want a subset, and choose residential, commercial, or agricultural addresses or any combination thereof. We pay a fee per piece. The hitch is that for the small-scale mailing we did we had to deliver the boxes ourselves to the various postal distribution centres serving the area, but I imagine they do it in a less cumbersome way if you’re mailing out to the whole country or even the whole province.
I can’t tell you anything about how to go about doing this, but I can give some information about the cost. According to http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html, there are 129,969,653 households in the United States, or at least there were in 2009. If you’re going for first-class presorted mail, the cost per letter is 41.4¢, and so to send a letter to every household would cost $53,807,436.30. I believe other types of mail may be cheaper, but probably not more than half this.
I should point out that the process I mentioned above is for unadressed admail, i.e. sending an identical piece to everyone without an address or postage. I forget what it cost but it was far less than regular lettermail (currently 59 cents, about to rise to 61 cents).
It doesn’t seem to mention rates, although I’m sure you could dig deeper, but I know as a non-profit, we had to spend $180 or so to get a non-profit permit, and then since we sorted the mail and took it to the distribution center, we paid somewhere between 15 and 17 cents a piece, I don’t remember the exact rate. And if we were able to barcode them, we would have saved more.
And even though we had a service standardize and check our addresses, it was still somewhere around 50 cents charge for each one that bounced. Ouch.
If you just want to send a letter to every house (excluding businesses), you address it to “Occupant”, deliver enough copies to the USPO, and pay the postage.
It costs about 17¢ each, if you deliver the letters to the main bulk mail station of the area (the first 3 numbers of the zip code). It costs a couple of cents more if you deliver them to a different bulk mail center. [So here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, it’s common to deliver all of those for Minneapolis & suburbs to the 554 bulk center in Minneapolis, and all those for St. Paul & suburbs to the 551 bulk center in St. Paul. For a big mailing, saving 2¢ each is worth the hassle of doing 2 separate deliveries.]
If you actually want them labeled with the name & address for each household, that will cost a whole lot more. First, buying lists of all the names & addresses. Then having those ink-jet printed onto the letters. Finally, keeping all the letters for each zip code separate, keeping separate counts for each, etc. Then you have to deal with all the ones where the people have moved since you got those lists – they will be rejected and not delivered to the addresses, and you have to either have the Post Office throw them away, or return them to you (at about 52¢ each).
So some households won’t get them this way. Much simpler to just send them to “Occupant”. But then, some households won’t get them either – many people throw such mail away unopened.
