Christmas means burial by catalog
It’s the time of year when retailers who lose money for ten months suddenly start to get profitable, and when, by the way, soup kitchens and other charities are in the most dire need for cash - which will start to come in starting in December (next year, make a mental note to contribute before Thanksgiving!). Our house is starting to get buried in an avalanche of unwanted catalogs, some from companies we’ve never heard of and never ordered from, others from companies we actually do order from, but not every three days.
Personally, I like the people who send out catalogs when they have a reason - like B&H, which appears to send two or three per year, or Digikey, which sends one per year. I loathe companies like Newport News, which appear to have dozens of names for reselling the same rubbish, and appear to believe that we have a bottomless recycling bin. I don’t think the mail carriers particularly like having to make multiple trips on their routes, one with the catalogs, and the other with actual mail. Our mailbox frankly is incapable of handling the holiday load.
This is why I was happy to find http://www.catalogchoice.org/ (NOT .com) — a web site set up by some environmental groups to help us cancel our catalog subscriptions without having to cut out and mail the back page of the catalog to each sender, which is rather time consuming. We took three days’ worth of catalogs and decided which ones we didn’t want. For my wife, that was 18 different catalogs; for me, it was three, two of which appear to have been related to my using FTD. Well, I won’t make that mistake again.
Unfortunately, it seems to take up to ten weeks for the mailers to stop sending catalogs, so we’ll have a glossy, full-color Christmas, but hopefully the new year will bring less four-color advertising delivered to the door. Personally, I can’t imagine that this policy of constantly sending catalogs to anyone and their dog pays off; and I did read, some time ago, that a few companies had actually looked through their mailing lists and struck off people who never ordered (and duplicates going to the same address) without any harm, and, indeed, a massive financial savings. Other companies automatically switch non-customers to a “now and then” catalog receipt category which also saves money, paper, and energy (moving thousands of catalogs across the country, then to recycling plants, then recycling them is not energy-free), while preventing toxic waste from being created.
Do yourself and everyone else a favor. Gather up the unwanted catalogs and instead of trashing or recycling them, put them into a pile, and once a week or so visit http://www.catalogchoice.org/ until you have no more unwanted advertising coming to your front door. Except, of course, from Bank of America. They’re incorrigible.
