Push Back on the Junk Mailers
I have a plan. Let's push back on the junk mailers and phone solicitors by wasting their time. Goodness knows junk mail wastes our time and money. Yellow Book USA is one such wasteful company. They publish phone books in Phoenix. Yellow Book hires day laborers to load up small moving vans and canvas Valley neighborhoods (especially apartment complexes). This thoughtless company has delivered a three or four (maybe more, I lost count) sets of new phone books to my home just this year! What a waste. I don't know what doofus oversees Yellow Book in Phoenix but I betcha they don't sleep well.
Anyhoo, after I ran after and caught one of their vans recently -- and made them take back the new set of books that had just landed on my porch, "no thank you, I still have the ones you gave me this summer" -- I got to thinking, how else can I fight the junk mailers? Because IMO these unthoughtful losers are n degrees worse than the spam emailers. Spam does not consume forests (millions of trees per year). Spam does not require and produce numerous toxic chemicals [PDF] to refine. Spam also does not require a lot of energy to produce. Paper junk mail is just the opposite. Paper junk mail is ecologically unsound.
| Paper has gotten more expensive. Unfortunately this cost has been passed along to the advertisers...and ultimately to you and I. We pay so the junk mail can continue to flow. I've taken steps to decrease the amount of paper mail I get. But the junk keeps coming and it really frustrates me. So I've started to return junk mail with phony info. If it comes to me with a postage paid return envelope then I fill it out their form with unusable information and mail it back! The more legit it looks, the more time they will waste before realizing it's bogus. If everyone does this it will use up a lot of their time. |
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I waste telemarketers' time as well. When they call, I say "just a minute", and put the phone down. (I'll go back a few minutes later and hang it up.) Also, when answering, if I don't immediately hear someone say "hello", I press a number key. That way, if it's an auto-dialer, the machine detects a sound on my end and will queue someone to take the line. Nice one! I've just wasted a little bit more of their time.
Anyone have any other suggestions?