In this article about a mailman in North Carolina who simply stopped delivering junk mail, I find it both amusing and odd that the fact that nobody complained or was even remotely bothered that their junk mail did not make its way to them was noted by either the direct marketing association spokesperson or by the mail service that enables them.
Admittedly, there is money being made and that’s the driver. But any drug pusher or criminal has that motivation too.
We receive *thousands* of pieces of this crap every year. I do what I can to minimize it. I’ve even contacted some of the more egregious catalog senders to have them limit their mailings to a few times per year (Victoria’s Secret graciously responded and now I get something maybe quarterly rather than weekly. Can you imagine how many catalogs I had to receive before even *I* didn’t want to look at them anymore???).
This year again, the AOPA Air Safety foundation sent me a half dozen thick envelopes filled with sample cards in spite of my contacting them to ask them to reduce such. I received no response at all from a recent email to them. I declined to purchase this year as a result.
There are a lot of necessary excesses that we learn to tolerate as a price for our way of life. We see things like driving 1-2 tons of metal a mile to get a $2 quart of milk as reasonable and (somehow) proper. But some things simply have no value-add in my life, and I believe in most other folks’ lives. In my opinion, anything that is unsolicited and provides no benefit, even as a side-effect (TV ads, for instance, at least provide the entertainment value of the accompanying programming), can be stamped out without hesitation.