Vitanuova for 2005 September 5 (entry 0)

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I still haven't finished my series of posts about fighting junk mail, but I promise to get around to it some day.

I was just looking at the Post Office's Setting the Record Straight page, which catalogues the letters written by USPS public relations vice president Azeezaly S. Jaffer to various people who said mean things about the Post Office. Jaffer gets on the case whenever someone criticizes postal rates or uses a term like "going postal" or "junk mail".

"Junk mail"? The Post Office doesn't want people to call it "junk mail"?

That's right: they want you to call it "advertising mail".

Ms. Hornidge does express concern over what we here like to call advertising mail although she has another term for it. I would ask though that she bear in mind while that some might call it "junk," to others it's a solicitation from a favorite charity, it's an offer on a favorable mortgage interest rate to the young couple buying a first home or a bargain on a car to someone who needs one.

Or again:

So, you'll understand that I'm also annoyed when people use the term "junk mail." To some, it's "junk mail" but to others, it's solicitation from your favorite charity, it's news on an attractive mortgage interest rate to the young couple buying their first home, it's information on a bargain price on a car for someone who needs one and yes, it's a part of the economic engine that makes this country go.

More importantly, unlike the telemarketer interrupting your dinner, ad mail is not intrusive. It's delivered to a box at your home and you can look at it at your leisure—or not at all. Only you are in control of your mail. So I'd suggest you be patient, and enjoy your evening "mail moment." Who knows, you might find a bargain.

Or again:

So, I'm always disheartened when a newspaper chooses to refer to advertising mail as "junk," as in your July 8 story "You've got mail - junk mail, that is."

That story can only be described as an all-out assault on the advertising mail profession and it didn't just quote others but in the words of your writer, Carolyn Straub, "There you have it: Junk mail. Phooey."

Well, to some it is junk mail. But to others, it's a solicitation from a charity in need. It's also an offer on a favorable mortgage interest rate for a young couple buying their first home, or a bargain on an automobile to someone who needs one.

To a lot of other people, this so called "junk" is a job. The livelihood of more than a million Californians depends on the advertising mail industry. This number is not just the creative employees of an advertising agency but it also includes the printers, typesetters, truck drivers, warehouse workers, paper recyclers, office workers and yes, mail carriers and more who are connected to the development and delivery of advertising mail.

Maybe the Postal Service is touchy about junk mail because it makes a large portion of its revenue from unsolicited bulk mail that it knows the public hates and would love to get rid of. Only the extremely effective political organization of the junk mail industry has probably stopped Congress from putting an end to junk mail. Meanwhile, the Postal Service adopts policies that help prevent junk mailers from finding out about the fact that most people they target are upset about that fact. Significantly, although other categories of mail can be refused or returned to the sender at the sender's, or the post office's, expense, third class mail can practically never be returned at all unless the recipient is willing to pay to return it (something I've begun doing on a regular basis).

We need to find strategies that will raise the direct and indirect costs both to senders of junk mail for sending it and to the post office for carrying it. The lobbying arms of the junk mail industries are too powerful -- and their product too profitable for USPS -- to make it foreseeable that the Postal Service will do anything to reduce junk mail solely because people hate it (or editorialize against it).


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Contact: Seth David Schoen