Is your mailbox cluttered with unwanted stuff? Here are some
tips.
Ask a passerby if he or she has ever thought of a novel use for that daily dollop of coupons, catalogues, postcards and nowhere CDs – alias junk mail – and what do you get? Deadpan. An are-you-serious grin. Here’s a sampling of responses:
“I don’t really care,” said Taylor Reynolds, an eighth-grader at the Charter School of Morgan Hill, who was interning for the day at BookSmart, a bookstore in Morgan Hill. “We shred it and recycle it. My little brother, Trenton, 9, likes to use the shredder.”
“I get a lot of ideas for the store,” offered Cinda Meister, the owner. “We get tons of things you’d consider junk mail. I probably recycle 80 percent. We offer free city recycling boxes to customers.” Someone at the counter, without turning around, flatly muttered, “I have no use for it.”
Outside Home Depot in Gilroy, Jack Blaser of Hollister pondered creative uses. “No. I usually round file it.”
“I’d rather not get it,” said Jill Weightman of Morgan Hill, who has taught art. “Well, for fire starters, and it does make good papier mâché.”
Cornered at the edge of the store, sales associate Ruben Correa said bluntly: “I dislike junk mail. Do with it? Basically nothing.”
There you have it: Junk mail. Phooey.
Junk mail is unsolicited mail that comes to your home. In the advertising world, it is known as “direct marketing.” And many customers don’t hesitate to contact direct marketers to express their displeasure with the inundation.
“Yes, I get calls every five minutes,” said Awilda Villegas, a customer service representative with ADVO, a direct-marketing company based in Windsor, Conn. “We remove customers from our lists, but it takes about eight weeks to complete. We promise 100 percent removal.”
ADVO is behind the store mailers full of coupons that arrive in the mail and the missing children ads. ADVO is one of the single largest private customers of the U.S. Postal Service, according to www.StopJunkMail.org.
But it’s an effective form of advertising for clients from grocers to general retailers to insurance companies, says Mary Lou Dlugolenski, director of corporate communications at ADVO. In 2004, these clients spent $1.2 billion on direct mail advertising through ADVO, she said.
“We measure store traffic for our clients, coupon redemption and store sales. We get a very positive response,” Dlugolenski said. “Direct mail is absolutely effective.”
Still, some consumers remain unconvinced, and a whole Web site is dedicated to educating them on how they can staunch the flow of junk mail.
The site www.StopJunkMail.org was spun off by the Bay Area Junk Mail Reduction Campaign in a two-week blitz this past year to let people know how they can stop junk mail.
“It’s the most successful campaign we’ve ever done,” said Susan Katchee, senior program manager for Stopwaste.org, a regional agency in San Leandro that helped to coordinate the nine-county and 110-city junk-mail stoppage crusade. The drive reached parts of South Valley, and was held in league with the Bay Area Recycling Outreach Coalition, a consortium of city and county agencies.
“The public sees it as a nuisance,” said Katchee. “We received 1,500 phone calls and 250,000 hits to the drive’s Web site immediately. People called to thank me from their cars,” Katchee said. “I think we have the right to take measures to reduce unsolicited mail.”
Katchee said about 5 percent of waste in landfills is catalogues, magazines and junk mail – about 71,000 tons a year on average in each of the nine Bay Area counties.
Nationally, here’s one picture: “The United States Postal Service delivered more than 200 billion pieces of mail, and about 42 billion was directly related to promotional mail and catalogues, according to a 2004 report,” Katchee said.
What’s a person to do?
“We tell our clients about the three R’s,” Katchee said, “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” A sure-fire way to get rid of it for good? “Don’t get it in the first place,” she said.
That may leave some wondering if it’s possible.
“You have to be vigilant,” Katchee said. “Once you buy something, refinance your home, send in a warranty, you get back on a list again.”
The Web site comes complete with a “tear-off,” a link to the junk mail-reduction kit. The Web site also lists the names and addresses of major junk-mail list providers and offers sample letters and templates to write them, as well as information about company Web sites.
Here are a few junk-mail reduction Web sites: Bay Area Junk Mail Reduction Campaign, www.StopJunkMail.org; New American Dream, www.newdream.org/index.php; Direct Marketing Association, www.dmaconsumers.org/index.html. Or, for telephone information, call the Bay Area Junk Mail Reduction Campaign Hotline at (877) 786-7927.
OK, so you’ve got junk mail. What shouldn’t you do?
First of all, don’t write “return to sender” or “refused” on unsolicited mail and place it back in your mailbox. The post office doesn’t forward third-class bulk mail so it will be discarded, according to the campaign Web site. And don’t return unsolicited mail postage due. Trying to get the attention of a company by returning your accumulated junk mail in an envelope – with insufficient postage – just won’t help either.
Here are some activities that could increase the deluge you receive. Choose with care and when you do, ask that your name not be sold or distributed on mailing lists:
When you enter sweepstakes or contests
Fill out warranty cards
Donate to charity organizations
Register at meetings or conferences
Have your address listed in a publication
Order from a catalog
Sign up for a service (car insurance, health care, etc.)
a credit card
By Carolyn Straub Special to South Valley Newspapers
