New Delivery of ‘Junk Mail’ to Be Tested

The Postal Service next month will begin a yearlong test that critics say will lead to a sharp upsurge in the commercial circulars often called “junk mail.”

Those flyers, which now have to be mailed to a specific address and often arrive with the impersonal greeting “Occupant,” will be delivered in four test cities to every dwelling along a requested route and will need only the even more impersonal “Postal Patron” or “Neighbor.” The Postal Service plan to enable advertisers to pay for delivery by route would eliminate the costs of buying mailing lists and commercial mail services.

One postal expert said the test threatens to turn “every Kinko’s in every strip mall” into an advertising mail producer. “To become a mailer, I just need a Xerox machine, that’s all,” another mail industry official said Thursday.

Postal officials said the change will help small businesses that need cheap advertising, but newspaper officials and bulk mailers were furious about the unannounced proposal, charging that it will place the federal agency in direct competition with them for advertising dollars. “I think the Postal Service has lost its way,” said Tonda F. Rush, president of the National Newspaper Assn., a group of 4,000 community newspapers. “They think they are in the advertising business.”

Loren Smith, a senior Postal Service vice president, rejected the criticisms, arguing that the new service was targeted at businesses too small to be served by newspapers or bulk mailers.

Until now, the Postal Service has required each piece of advertising mail to go to a specific address. That requirement has spawned a large mail advertising industry--companies like Harte-Hanks Communications Inc., which spend millions of dollars developing and maintaining up-to-date mailing lists of residents in the nation’s most affluent neighborhoods.

Under the new service called “neighborhood mail,” all a merchant would need do to have his advertising qualify for delivery is to place the phrase “Postal Patron” or “Neighbor” on the material and present it to a postal window clerk, according to individuals who have been briefed on the proposal. The merchant would pay between 11 cents and 12 cents per piece to have the advertising delivered to every house on a selected route.

The test cities are Rochester, N.Y., New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., and Sacramento.