You’ve Got (Too Much) Mail
Some blizzard, eh? Not snow.
The blizzard of glossy catalogs that becomes an avalanche inside your mailbox this time every year.
Besides the usual bundle of catalogs, one correspondent recently wrote, she is accumulating at least three new catalogs every week--mostly unwanted. “Things are really getting out of hand now that Christmas is approaching,” she says. “I am getting duplicates of many catalogs--sometimes three a day.”
No surprise there.
Direct marketing sales are booming. The Alliance for Environmental Innovation figures more than 17 billion catalogs were distributed in the United States in 1998. This year’s direct marketing sales are projected to surpass $1.5 trillion in the United States alone, reaching $2.2 trillion in five years, reported H. Robert Wientzen, president and chief executive of the Direct Marketing Assn., at the trade group’s annual conference. The biggest winners: multi-channel-marketing companies that deliver online sales pitches, on TV and radio, and in that mountain of catalogs.
Deciding she had been multi-channeled enough, the woman being deluged by catalogs called some of the retailers’ customer service reps to ask that they remove her from their lists. “Many of them gave me such a hard time that I got pretty annoyed and frustrated,” she said, and wondered if there’s an easy way to stop junk mail.
In fact, she took the right initial step to reduce catalog mailings. But there’s no easy, foolproof solution--which is why this is a perennial problem. To decrease the number of catalogs and junk mail you receive:
* With the catalog label handy, call each company’s toll-free number and ask the sales rep to remove your name from the mailing list. If the rep balks, ask for the supervisor--and get names. If the catalogs don’t stop within a couple of months, the names will come in handy when you write to complain to the company’s chief executive. To eliminate pesky duplicate mailings of a catalog you do want, ask the company to delete the extra listing. Some companies will even honor requests to receive catalogs less frequently. Note that this is tedious, frustrating and doesn’t always work.
* The clearinghouse strategy: Write to DMA Mail Preference Service (P.O. Box 9008, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11735-9008) and include your name (as it appears on the catalog labels), address, ZIP code and your request to “activate DMA’s preference service.” It will take as long as six months to kick in, but this is supposed to stop catalogs and other junk mailings from DMA’s member companies for five years. Most likely this will also end some of the unsolicited mail you want to receive--and not all that you don’t want. Once on the MPS list, if you order from a catalog or call a company to request its catalog, you’re back in circulation again.
* Many credit-card companies sell cardholder lists. Call yours and say you don’t want your name and address sold to mailing lists and other companies. Demand the same when donating to charities, entering contests or sweepstakes and filling out product warranty cards.
* Several Web-based groups offer services to help consumers stop unwanted mailings--some for free, some not. Junkbusters (https://www.junkbusters
.com) provides free draft letters to the major vendors, as well as other services. For a $10 fee, Private Citizen (https://www.private-citizen
.com) serves as an anti-junk mail lobbying group and adds you to the list of its directory notifying junk mailers not to mail to you.
* Unwanted mail can also be a problem for home-based and small businesses. The National Waste Prevention Coalition recently created a “Reduce Business Junk Mail” Web site (https://www.metrokc
.gov/nwpc) to provide information and resources.
“If you get a lot of unwanted mail and are concerned about the paper waste and the time you lose going through this mail, and important mail getting lost,” the coalition’s coordinator, Tom Watson, says of consumers and business owners alike, “then you need to be aggressive.”
