I’m not in the bulk business mailing industry.
But consider this: You have a Post Office Box. You are agreeing to the conditions of having that box. It is a voluntary agreement on your part.
You are free to remove your box, pull the post out of the ground, and never recieve junk mail again. You would effectively be cancelling your agreement.
I suppose you’re never looking at commercials on television, listening to them on the radio, or reading billboards on the highways, either right? Good, I wouldn’t want to see you being inconsistent. Paying for cable television and there being ads on there? Shudder! The horror!
Ads are a fact of life. Paid for ads fund other things we want and need. Television itself is an ad medium. If there were no ads, we’d not have much television programming. It’s a capitalist, for-profit venture. It doesn’t exist to serve you news, entertainment, or the arts. It exists to sell ads. Rush Limbaugh isn’t on the radio just to inform the masses, he’s selling advertising.
The Post Office is lucky to have such good businesses advertising like they do. I know it costs a LOT to advertise even in small communities for a local business. But the bulk advertising is a great way for small businesses to advertise to a targeted area. Some ads go to rural addresses only, not in town, and some are vice versa. Some only go to ONE mail route in an office, even when there are multiple mail routes. This is very good for businesses.
If you don’t want ads SO BAD that you’ll stoop to such hyperbole as calling it worse than prostitution, hey, communist countries probably don’t have much advertising. Maybe you’d be happier there than in a capitalist country where businesses are free enterprise. I am so sorry for you that your trash costs are so high that a few bulk business mailings are breaking the bank, or whatever. I suppose you could burn it, that would be much cheaper. Matches are often given away, so those don’t have to cost either. Oh, wait, there’s ads in free matchbooks.
First I’m a hypocrite and now I’m a communist.
All because I don’t think a constitutionally mandated, government sponsored organization should use it’s unique position to force citizens to recieve crap they don’t want.
312 days per year, we get junk mail. 312 days I have to take 30 seconds to a few minutes of my life to sort through crap I never asked for and don’t want. Open solicitations disguised as legitimate correspondence. Do the math. It’s not inconsequential. I’ve put all the junk mail in a box, just to see how much comes in. Less than a month will fill a copy paper box. There are about 200k households in my city. That’s a mountain.
I’d love to rip out my mailbox, except they’d deliver the crap anyhow and toss it on my porch - ask me how I know. And, unfortunately, not every utility has internet billing.
How many people, if given the choice, would accept junk mail? My guess is something even less than the low-single-digit response rates most bulk ad campaigns bring in.
Unlike television, radio, internet, etc. I don’t have a choice with mail delivery. I can’t opt out of it and I have lost correspondence that I suspect got caught up in one of the many ad flyers that get immediately tossed in our house. Maybe my neighborhood in the city is unusual, but we get bunches of the stuff, despite being on the DMA list.
I’m sure that if the people sending this stuff my way knew that not only does all of it get tossed, any business I recognize I will purposely not patronize, they might not sned me any more. But there’s no mechanism to stop it, certainly not on my end. These days, the ratio of crap to legitimate correspondence is something like 10:1. It’s getting out of hand.
Worse, just like the glazier’s fallacy, it is a tremendous waste of physical and human resources, creating, printing, packaging and delivering a bunch of paper that goes directly into the trash (likely in the upper 90% of cases) without ever having been read by anyone but the sender.
I’ve heard the argument that it lowers the cost of mail. I reject it. If it weren’t for junk mail, based on my experience of the amount I receive, the USPS wouldn’t need at least half, if not more, of the staff it has. Costs would drop tremendously, and we’d all be better off.
Would it still be free enterprise if they sent me concrete blocks that I didn’t want and which had to dispose of? How about used motor oil? Why is it suddenly free enterprise when its a large amount of paper that comes a little bit at a time?