A Life Coach Rant On Junk Mail

Just lately the junk mail we receive seems to have gone into unabated overdrive. One day last week I got 20 pieces on one day! Everything from brochures for stores that I wasn’t aware we had ever been in to offers for houses that we have no intention of ever buying to the ubiquitous offers of credit cards and fake promises that we have been specially chosen for some unbelievable offer that I simply must take up now or my life will become a meaningless sham!

I no longer really even look closely at this junk, it is an overwhelming task that would probably waste even more time that I would rather use for more productive and fulfilling tasks. So now the mail goes straight into the trash and anything slightly more substantial goes for recycling resulting in any genuinely interesting offers (and occasionally legitimate mail) getting missed.

Was it always like this? I don’t think so but maybe my mind is playing tricks.

About 3 or 4 weeks ago I noticed that we seemed to be getting 5 or 6 offers a week for American Express credit cards and a similar amount from Citi Bank. The more I thought about this the more I got ticked off because I simply did not want them, I would never chose a credit card based on some (supposedly) artfully written unsolicited letter arriving in my mail box. So around that time I sent one application back with the words ‘not interested, please take me off your mailing list” written across the middle. Obviously this had no effect whatsoever, so I did it again and again and again. I got on a bit of a role I must say and to date I have probably sent about 25 offers back asking to be removed.

There are two ways to look at this. The first way is for me to say ‘give it up you are being childish, it’s the way of the world and you are not going to get your name removed let alone change anything of substance’ The second way would be ‘Stick with it, if more people sent this stuff back and the card companies had to pay the postage on millions of letters they would soon reassess their strategy’

We are being bombarded with millions of unsolicited pieces of mail every day and the waste is mind blowing. It’s not even as though the majority of this mail is trying to generate new market places and thus create new jobs, it is simply trying to get you to change from one supplier to another, it’s what the industry calls churn. I’m ranting a bit here I know and I am not sure whether I will even keep on with my one man stand (some would say actions like this just push up banking costs in general and maybe they are right I really don’t know) but I feel better for at least making my feelings known.

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