Up in here, up in here!! My mail person keeps delivering a trash bag of junk mail each week. With the mid-term elections coming up it has tripled. I get Beans Greens Potatoes Tomatoes Lamb Rams Hogs Maws, Beans Greens Potatoes Tomatoes Chicken Turkeys Rabbit YOU NAME IT!!!!! I fill up a 13 gallon trash bag every week with junk mail and folks it getting old. So I decided to do a little research and I have found out there are somethings you can do.
The Sightline Institute says each American receives an average of 41 pounds of junk mail per year. New York University says 5.6 million tons of junk mail end up in American landfills every year. Ecocycle.org says we may spend as much as eight months of our life sorting junk mail. The strange thing is if you don’t want to be on there mailing list, they will gladly take you off. Direct mailers spend about $30 billion a year sending this stuff out and only half of it gets opened. They like, “When do you want to get off… YOU NAME IT !!!” They don’t want to be sending out materials no one is reading, with half of it ending up in the round file. So it pretty easy to get off these list. One solution is DMAChoice.org, a tool offered by the Data & Marketing Association, lets you remove your name and address from a number of these lists. After registering an account and paying a $2 fee, you can unsubscribe from entire categories of mail — like catalogs and advertisements — or unsubscribe from specific catalogs you don’t want. What about those pre-approved credit and insurance offers? Not a problem. You’ll need to sign up for OptOutPrescreen.com, a service offered by the major credit bureaus. You’ll need to give them some information, including your Social Security number, but don’t worry — it’s a legitimate service, recommended by the Federal Trade Commission. You can opt out of these offers for five years online, or you can mail in a form to opt out permanently.
Publishers Clearing House and Readers Digest will make you do the Hokey Pokey and turn yourself around dance. They are serial mailers. Fortunately, it is easy to get removed from their list. PCH has an online form you fill out and Readers Digest will stop the madness if you contact them here. If you contribute once a year to a charitable organization, ask them to send you only one donation request per year. Do not contribute to a charities mailing. Give directly to them. Charities routinely share donors list among themselves. Tired of those Valupak coupons for self addressed envelope stickers and guaranteed for 5 years yellow insect lights? Here is a link that will put a stop to that. There are two major companies that sell our names and addresses to direct mailers. The companies are called “data brokers.” They make money giving our personal information to the direct marketers. You might remember that sunken place Facebook was in last year when it was found out that the personal information north of 50 million people had been stolen by the data broker and political research firm Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg was in front of every congressman and senator in the United States explaining and apologizing for every byte that was stolen. The Europeans also tore him a new one. Everybody wanted a piece of him.. “YOU NAME IT!!!”
Anyway, you don’t have to put up with it. With a little bit of time and correspondence you can walk out to your mail box and although that old junk mail might be gone, you might nostalgically think back to that time when….
Be the first to comment