U.S. Should Halt All Junk Mail

October 22, 2001 | Woodstock

[Woodstock]

U.S. Should Halt All Junk Mail (my headline)

In the wake of a massive and devastating terrorist attack on U.S. soil on September 11 and country-wide concern about mail tainted with virulent forms of Anthrax, would it not make sense to halt all unsolicited mail sent via the USPS?

And what about Publishers Clearinghouse mailing OxiClean samples in their November sweepstakes kick-off? Are they crazy? I hope they postpone this idea.

Effective immediately, all junk mail should be halted until the FBI, CDC and US postal Inspectors have a better handle on the situation. (And if you asked me, it should stay halted permanently.)

[John Jamieson]

Seems like junk mail may be the only safe mail.

Don't you just love the new post office slogan: "Let the monkey business begin!"

[Anthem]

This post qualifies as junk mail. You're under arrest.

[paul51]

While we are at it, let's get rid of all the different kinds of stamps. Ever stand in line at the post office while some idiot tries to decide what picture they want on the stamps? What the heck difference does it make? Multiply this a few million times every day around the country. What a frickin waste.

[goodieD]

There is a difference between "harmless free enterprise", which I whole heartedly support, and unsolicited harrassment, which is junk mail. If I ask a company for more info, that's fine, but if, instead of just advertising in a public way, they send unasked for mail to my private address, then it's harrassment. I've gotten 6 identical catalogs from the same company in the last 2 weeks! Even after requesting very politely that it be stopped.

[goodieD]

it was my understanding that many of them had no return address. and the post office was telling people to be wary of mail with no return address.

[Woodstock]

What would happen if everyone put *Return to Sender* on their junk mail?

[max61]

Sure why not, we can always use another couple hundred thousand jobless people in the country.

---max

[IceGirl2]

That is stupid. How many people do you want to put out of work? This is exactly what they want. There are hundreds of thousands of people whose lives depend on the advertisement that we receive (and use)--from the creators to the photographers to the packers to the printers to the ones who make the products. Dumb. Dumb. And dumber.

[IceGirl2]

I do hate that one of the woman on the escalator with the flu. Pull it. I turn it off the minute I see it coming.

[TightSqueeze]

Could you imagine the death toll after a couple of thousand postal workers are laid off?

There will be no need to lay them off if the anthrax attrition continues.

[LibWhacker]

Has anyone here tried that gizmo . . .

Hi, Bill! Save that fifty dollars! Cheap buzzard that I am, here's what I did: I went here and copied the SIT tone to my own hard disk (just in case this particular web page took it down at some later date and I needed it), then I placed my answering machine's microphone close to my computer's speaker and recorded the SIT as my answering machine's "greeting."

The recording has some background noise, but it's good enough.

Whenever the telemarketing calls become too much of a nuisance, I switch to the SIT greeting for a week or so. Then I go back to my regular greeting for a few months.

This works great on the "predictive diallers" and even on many human-initiated telemarketing calls.

You just have to make sure that there is a pause of 3 or 4 seconds between the end of the SIT and the beep telling your caller to leave a message (else you'll confuse the predictive software and may not get your number tagged as invalid). :-)

[Bill Rice]

Cool THANKS!

I usually have fun being rude to them, (asking them for their # so I can interupt THEM taking a dump), and my girlfriend gets mad at ME over it.

[Brookhaven]

Such a waist of money, and causing us all to pay more for regular mail. $0.34 is outragous.

I feel strange comming to the defense of junk mail, but here goes.

If there was not junk mail, your stamps would be higher than $0.34, not lower. The post office makes more profit delivering junk mail than it does delivering first class mail. Junk mail actually subsidises your personal letter, not the other way around.

The rates are lower for junk mail because the mailer has taken steps that save the post office money.

Junk mail also helps the post office cover their fixed costs. Your mail carrier has to stop and check every mailbox on thier route, even if they have no mail for it. That's a fixed cost for the post office. The marginal cost of having the carrier stick a bundle of junk mail in your mailbox is much less than the postage on those letters.

The same is true of the mail network. The post office has to maintain a network of post offices and transfer letters between them. The marginal cost of transfering some additonal junk mail through this already exising network is not as much as the postage for those letters.

Junk mail may be a PITA, but it is not the reason your first class stamps are so high.

[Brookhaven]

halt all unsolicited mail sent via the USPS?

Since all the antrax letters were first class mail addressed by hand, wouldn't it make more sense to stop that instead of junk mail?

Or are you just trying to take advantage of the situation to eliminate one of your pet peeves in life: junk mail?

[Koblenz]

Don't ban junk mail. First, it'll do nothing to solve the problem of anthrax in the mail, since people have been mailing anthrax individually, not in bulk. Indeed, if they were to send anthrax via bulk mail, it'd be quite easy to figure out who did it. Just look at the postal id.

Next, like it or not, some people order things via catalogues and junk mail. Really, it's true. LL Bean, for instance. And would catalogues be exempt from your proposed ban?

Also, the post office gets lots of revenue from junk mail. Without it, first class mail would be more expensive.

[RoseyT]

What would happen if everyone put *Return to Sender* on their junk mail?

If you mark non-first class mail "Refused/Return To Sender" it goes back to the Post Office, where a clerk has to handle it again and then it goes in the trash.

[discostu]

BING BING BING BING BING!!!

Give Wissa the prize. That's right folks junkmail is a valid form of advertisement (valid meaning it creates more revenue than it costs), if it wasn't you wouldn't get it. On top of that it's less intrussive than telemarketers and spam and therefore EASILY our least annoying form of "direct marketing".

And, of course, the majority of junk mail is postcard style, not a very good method of delivering disease. And, on top of that, junk mail has actually made the USPS profitable which it never was before the boom in direct marketing. Not that I think the government should be profitable, but it's nice to actually have a part of the government that A: does a good job (they really do if you think about the ammount of mail they successfully and correctly deliver on a daily basis), and B: only costs ME money when I use it.

Keep the junk mail coming. Especially those whacky catalogs, I love trying to figure out who actually buys that crap.

[discostu]

The only problem (I'm with you, but I'm addicted to full disclosure) is that now the USPS is used to making a profit so they keep doing stuff like raising rates and threatening to end saturday delivery because their margin is dropping. Every one has forgotten that up until the junk mail boom began in the early 90's USPS had ALWAYS lost money and had to be susidized with tax revenue; that's the reason postage stayed so low for so many years, the postage was never enough, they were always getting tax revenue, who cares of the postage is $.05 too little or $.10 too little. But thanks to the boom everybody has forgotten about all that, America has an amazingly short memory, gets us into trouble a lot.

[winna]

Effective immediately, all junk mail should be halted until the FBI, CDC and US postal Inspectors have a better handle on the situation.

Absolutely. Yesterday I got junk mail from Shop NBC! This is a not a good time for NBC to be sending out mass mailings. What are these people thinking?

[Atticus]

I received an interesting piece of junk mail at my office today. It is from Starbucks Coffee (which I dislike). The envelope is 6x9 inches and says to open for details on how you can receive a free stainless steel carafe. I have no doubt that the package is legitimate and untainted. The funny thing is that the envelope is designed to look like a crude package of brown wrapping paper held together with masking tape. Even my address looks like it was crudely taped on with masking tape. There is no actual brown paper or tape, it's just a well-done photographic image. It gives the package a certain amount of charm, but the timing of this promotion could not be worse!