What a waste!

I just spent the last 45 minutes going through various items of unsolicited junk mail. Everyone under the sun wants me to have their credit card. They want me to transfer balances from current accounts to their card account and are trying to sweeten the deal with various low interest rate offers. Eastbay wants me to order some new sneakers. West Elm is eager to show me its winter collection of bedroom sets and eclectic office furniture. The Clothing Broker boasts of suits from $49 (as if!) and is announcing that much of their inventory is 65% off! Lee’s Cleaners urges me to not only use its wash and fold servivce, but also to take advantage of their $ 0.99 same day dry cleaning special on shirts. All of this is supposed to be exciting to me.

It’s like this everyday. If it’s not these, it’s a collection of others. Even though I can get my statements online for various accounts, many still see fit to send me paper statements as well. Thankfully, some of them have an option to stop the barage of paper. We must waste an unconscionable amount of paper each day in this country, and for what? I don’t know if I’m just flat out not their target market or if the majority of recipients of all of this excessive solicitation are just as annoyed as I am, but it is truly lost on me. In fact, I think I’m less likely to patronize their businesses when they send me all of this stuff. At least TV commercials try to entertain me just a little bit. Of course they are once again unsuccessful in their main objective as I can rarely remember the brand name or what exactly it was that they were advertising in my favorite commercials. Unfortunately, advertising in print burns precious resources (trees) while TV commercials only make it a little more difficult for us to enjoy whatever programming we are tuned into on a given night. Why doesn’t anyone see this as a problem? Is it really necessary to bombard me with mail everyday? What if there were a law passed that limited the amount of junk mail that could be sent from each source? What if junk mail were only allowed to be sent on Mondays or something like that? That would be an improvement. After all, I have received something from 3 different Bank of America credit card products this week, and it’s only Wednesday! I get the point. Besides, I am so much more likely to check a website for a special anyway. In the event that it slips my mind, one weekly reminder would be much more palatable than 5!

Besides, wouldn’t this save the companies money? If they didn’t have to print all of this stuff up, they would save a fortune, and furthermore would not have to pay the cost of postage for all of these millions of items they must send out each day. They could use the money saved on all of this useless advertising to invest back into their employees. Maybe they could have a profit sharing program or give some nice quarterly bonueses. This would boost morale and likely productivity. As a result, bottom lines would probably increase and at a greater margin since the expense that went in to producing all of the worthless mailers would be eliminated. I better stop before I get put on some communist watch list.

Such an approach would be far to pragmatic for a country that prides itself in its displays of excess. Private sector corporations will spend millions on mail that likely has a greater chance of heading straight from the mailbox to the shredder (unopened even!) than it does of being read, and even less chance of having a recipient actually sign up for one of the services or offers. The Federal Government spends Trillions (yes, with a T) of dollars on a war in a far off land that can’t be won, while failing to put any significant investment into the healthcare or education systems back here at home. That same Government supports a culture in which candidates will raise astronomical amounts of money by charging guests $25,000 per plate to eat the same chicken and rice pilaf dinner that you had at the Women’s Auxiliary Awards and Appreciation Luncheon last year, while just outside this banquet hall homeless and hungry people beg for nickels just to make it through another day. How backward are we to think that any candidate that runs a campaign within this frameword will actually turn around and effect any change on any of these issues once elected?

Well, that’s enough from my perch atop the proverbial soap box tonight. Uhuru!