Six Pounds of Junk Mail, Or, A Case Against the U.S. Postal Service

 

Yesterday I returned home from the office to find an enormous packet, wrapped in plastic, on the front porch–a set of catalogs from Restoration Hardware so big that, as the postman had apparently discovered, it wouldn’t fit inside our mailbox.

This made me angry. I didn’t ask for these catalogs. Far from it. The last time anyone in our family set foot in Restoration Hardware must have been six or seven years ago when I bought some towel hangers for the kids’ bathroom–and resolved, after paying what struck me as a staggering sum for some metal hoops finished in chrome, never to return. But this packet of catalogs arrived all the same.  

It contained not one or two but five catalogs I did not and do not want:  RH Outdoor & Garden, RH Interiors, RH Tableware, RH Small Spaces, and–no, I’m not making this up–RH Objects of Curiosity. I was so angry that I carried the packet inside, then climbed on the bathroom scale with it and once again without it and then calculated the difference: six pounds. Six pounds!

Restoration-Hardware-2-of-2.jpgIf a teenager had dropped six pounds of garbage on my front yard, he would have committed an act of vandalism and I could have called the police. But as long as they do so through an agent of the federal government–namely, our postman, who, come to think of it, had to be even unhappier to tote that six-pound packet than I was to receive it– the marketing department at Restoration Hardware may dump six pounds of garbage in front of my house entirely legally.  

Note further that FedEx and UPS only deliver items to my house that I have ordered or that have come from people I know–not once have I ever found myself heaving an item from a private delivery service into the recycling bin. But the United States Postal Service? Amid the odd item that I truly want, mounds of junk mail, six days a week.

Does this make sense?

It can’t–it just can’t.

The solution? Well, I’m not sure–to tell you the truth, I have yet to calm down enough to think it through. But if caller ID enables me to pick up the telephone only when someone calls to whom I truly wish to speak, and spam filters enable me to receive only emails I really want, then why should it lie beyond the wit of man to develop some sort of filtering system for mail?

For that matter, if in this age of FedEx, UPS and Internet we abolished the U.S. Postal Service altogether, what would we really be losing? I’m not saying we should abolish the postal service–as I say, I haven’t thought this through just yet. But I repeat:  What would we really lose if we did so?

And now you’ll excuse me. I have to take six pounds of garbage out to the recycling bin.

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  1. Profile Photo Inactive
    @Leigh

    For some reason, I object to junk mail much less than spam email.  And junk mail that doesn’t have my name on it I don’t really mind at all — there’s no invasion of privacy, just telling the community about a product or service being offered.

    Peter Robinson

    Note further that FedEx and UPS only deliver items to my house that I have ordered or that have come from people I know–not once have I ever found myself heaving an item from a private delivery service into the recycling bin. But the United States Postal Service? Amid the odd item that I truly want, mounds of junk mail, six days a week.

    Isn’t that simply because the junk mail distributors simply use the least expensive option available?  In other words, if there were no USPS, they would indeed use the private delivery service?

    Of course, if the rate is currently subsidized the volume would decrease if the subsidy ended.  But still, it all depends on how much incentive the market is providing for mass mailings.

    • #31
  2. Profile Photo Inactive
    @oregonjon

    Peter

    Here is what works to stop this abuse in our household:

    https://www.catalogchoice.org/

    • #32
  3. Profile Photo Inactive
    @FredCole

    Peter, if your platform is abolishing the USPS, I’m on board.  I’ll vote for you.

    • #33
  4. Profile Photo Contributor
    @jameslileks

    Ditto what gdfsp said; I use the PaperKarma app to nix junk mail. I’ve tried to get off the mailing list for a certain cruise line, to no avail – it’s just astonishing how many thick glossy brochures and books they send. Whatever they made on my cruise years ago, they surely have spent it by now.

    • #34
  5. Profile Photo Thatcher
    @RushBabe49

    My father supported our family with his “direct mail marketing” company.  My first paid job was stuffing envelopes at his company.  I learned about commercial printing, and actually enjoyed helping fulfill peoples’ orders for “Ways with Canned Salmon” brochures.  “Junk mail” has never been junk to me.  I recycle most of mine, but I positively LOVE thumbing through catalogs before I throw them in the recycle bin.

    • #35
  6. Profile Photo Member
    @BereketKelile

    Not to distract from the problem, but I can’t help but be curious about how you weighed the mail. I was wondering why you didn’t just put the bag on the scale by itself. It was pretty complex, which is why I probably wouldn’t have done that. 

    By the way, I hate when the mail you want is packed in between the junk flyers and other advertisements. You have to be careful lest you throw something out that you need.

    • #36
  7. Profile Photo Podcaster
    @EJHill

    160.7 billion pieces of junk mail per year

    $17.3 billion in revenue for the USPS

    The look on Peter’s face = Priceless (aka, watch this space)

    In-the-Palm.jpg

    • #37
  8. Profile Photo Member
    @

    Maybe it’s part of a nation-building project meant to keep people interconnected by subjecting them to a continual stream of advertisements, coupons and other promotions which would otherwise be ignored by most of the population.  For some people (like G. Costanza) getting the “daily mail” is all they have and all that keeps them from slipping into oblivion.

    Still, I’m all for slicing off a chunk of blubber from Leviathan, too.   

    • #38
  9. Profile Photo Inactive
    @DespairTroll
    raycon and lindacon:

    We have created a monster, and his name is Leviathan. · 1 hour ago

    Over the mail…? 

    • #39
  10. Profile Photo Inactive
    @skipsul

    Shameless self promotion plug, but I claim dibs on the earlier grudge against Restoration Hardware:

    To Wit:  Furniture for the Vapid, penned a bit over a year ago.

    • #40
  11. Profile Photo Inactive
    @RedFishBlueFish

    Solution is a law permitting everyone to turn off delivery service. Revenue on direct mail, which the post office needs to survive, would plummet, forcing Congress to restructure it into something that works.The real reason it still exists are the employees. No one has the guts to cause 500,000 people with no skills to be fired, even though its a service that is not useful. Sad, but true.

    • #41
  12. Profile Photo Inactive
    @PaulJCroeber

    Nope.  In fact there is a neighbor of mine who has a hand written cardboard sign attached to their mailbox stating “no phonebooks”.  It’s there year round.

    KC Mulville: Does anyone use phone books anymore? · April 27, 2013 at 7:07pm

    • #42
  13. Profile Photo Inactive
    @BlueAnt

    I’ll play devil’s advocate and support the existence of the USPS, if not its practices.

    A crucial function of government is to maintain contact with its citizens.  One cannot govern a territory without knowing its physical boundaries, and a government over a people must know who it is actually governing.  Postal and messenger services have been found necessary by every major empire/kingdom/state going back to antiquity, along with maintenance of the roads such messengers traveled.

    If a nation-state is defined by a physical border, and citizens as those residing within that boundary, then even a strictly minimalist federal state needs a way to catalog these physical realities.

    The US needs some way to coordinate 320 million people across 152 million locations, and if it wasn’t called USPS it would have some other alphabet soup name.

    Now, there is no reason that such contact must be maintained daily, merely reliably.  You could slash USPS delivery to 1-3 days a week and still carry out the needed functions of government.  And if there was real commercial need for more frequent delivery, complementary private services would spring up (after removing the USPS monopoly over post boxes).

    • #43
  14. Profile Photo Inactive
    @Devereaux

    Actually, you could slash delivery to only regular mail. Things like catalogs would be extra cost.

    The interesting fact is that in the US the NE for a long time had the BEST roads – and they were privately made. The thirst for public works dates back to Clay and the 1830’s, but it was wasteful then and it’s wasteful now. There are better ways to do things.

    • #44
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