One Person’s War Against Junk Mail

“Have you seen me?” asks the little card in the mailbox, soliciting my help in locating a child, duly pictured, who is reported to have disappeared long ago. On the back there is a discount coupon for a carpet cleaning service.

Every week or so I receive such a card and there’s a good chance you do too. Throwing it away used to cause a twinge of guilt, even though I realized the child, if missing at all, was more likely the subject of a custody dispute than something more sinister. Only recently did I learn that this card’s chief purpose is to advance the larger cause of junk mail.

Perhaps that’s being harsh. One man’s garbage is another’s livelihood. But at any rate--in this case, the bulk rate--that little card from Advo Inc., a national direct-mail advertising firm, exists primarily to inform our letter carriers where to deliver that loose sheaf of other ads that clog our mailboxes the same day.

John Nelson was a source of enlightenment. Nelson, 70, is a retired TV producer who lives in Northridge and hates junk mail. Really, truly hates it.

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Hates it so much, in fact, that he has waged a personal campaign that has taken him to the local offices of Advo, the PennySaver and his neighborhood branch of the U.S. Postal Service. Nelson decided to share his saga after reading a recent column of mine about a resourceful North Hollywood man who exacted revenge on an uncooperative mail-order firm by using his home computer and the company’s toll-free order line to fax hundreds of pages that said: “Please take my name off your mailing list.” Finally, they did just that. If only it had been that easy for Nelson.

The trouble started about 18 months ago. Not only would Nelson receive his ration of junk mail, he’d get somebody else’s as well. Sometimes, Nelson says, he’d receive three copies of every missing-child card, Advo ad and PennySaver.

“So I called up Advo and said I want you to take my name off the mailing list. They said, ‘We can do that. It takes about three weeks.’ ” He did the same with PennySaver.

A few weeks passed and the mail kept coming. To emphasize his anger, Nelson would drive down to the Advo offices in Encino and dump a load of unwanted ads. He’d do the same at PennySaver offices in Van Nuys. “It still didn’t stop,” he says.

Nelson figured that part, if not most, of the problem might be with the Postal Service. So he visited the branch on Reseda Boulevard and told the manager he kept getting Advo and PennySaver mailers even though the firms assured him he shouldn’t be. Nelson warned the postmaster that he would henceforth carry the offending mail to the post office and stuff it in his box. “Which I did,” he adds.

It was at about this point that a postal employee let him in on a dirty little secret. If you get that much junk mail, he was told, it must be that you’re near the end of a postal route. Mailmen and mailwomen have been known to unload surplus junk mail on unsuspecting customers.

Nelson knows that, eventually, his local postmaster got his message. Letter carriers who work the route were given yellow cards informing them that they were not to deliver Advo or PennySaver materials to the Nelson household.

The yellow card also declared: “Do not deliver this card to this address.”

Nelson knows this was done because the yellow card was indeed delivered to his home, along with the usual Advo pile and the usual PennySaver.

Once again, Nelson called up the post office. “I don’t want to sound sarcastic,” he recalls saying, “but do you hire people who can read?”

Three weeks later, Nelson says, he received more junk mail and yet another yellow card.

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When I called Advo’s Encino office, I spoke with a young woman who referred me to a man who has yet to return my phone call. When I called PennySaver, I spoke with a man who explained that it takes six weeks, not a mere three, to remove a name from a mailing list. Why so long? “It’s not as simple as it would seem because of the volume we’re dealing with,” he said.

Yes, it must be like brain surgery. Fact is, neither the direct-mail firms nor the Postal Service want to make it simple. The more ads that get mailed out, the more money they make, even if they’re destined for the trash.

Terri Bouffiou, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service, didn’t dispute this, but she assured me that most people don’t consider direct-mail ads junk at all. And some of those Advo cards, she told me, have indeed helped locate some missing people over the years. So there.

I told John Nelson about this and asked him whether he felt just the least bit guilty.

His answer was no. And Nelson wanted me to know that, on that very day, he’d received yet another batch from Advo. There were nine pieces, all clutter to him. This time there was no yellow card. But is that a good sign or a bad sign?