With each trip to the mail box you become more and more buried in tons of junk mail. Well no longer will you fall victim to the sneaky junk mail peddlers. Learn how to regain your mail box. Learn how to end junk mail forever.
What would you do if I sent you a bill for several dollars each month, for a service you didn’t want, and had not ordered? What if there was no way to dodge paying this bill and no matter what you tried the bill just kept coming? Well this is basically what happens when you get junk mail. (click on pictures for full sized images)
Most people don’t think about it but all that junk mail that gets sent to you has to go someplace. Most of us throw it away, some of us recycle it, but either way we are paying to dispose of it. Some communities pay to have their trash taken away, others use a tax system, and still others require that you pay for the right to use a dump. Even if you recycle the junk mail, you are still paying. Recycling in most communities is paid for the same way trash collection is.
Besides all the money it costs you, companies that make junk mail are wasting paper, wasting ink, wasting power to create the junk mail, wasting gas to send the mail to you, and wasting your time when you have to sort it out of the mail. So how can we make this madness stop? How can we stop junk mail?
It’s simple. We make it so expensive to send us junk mail that companies stop doing it. We use junk mail against itself. So about now you should be fired up, “Yea lets stick it to the man!†What we need to do is cost the junk mail people a lot of money. The way we do this is by moving the cost of disposal back into the hands of the junk mailers.
When you get some junk mail the first thing you should do is open it and look for the reply envelope. This little guy is amazing. Not only is it already filled out with the address of the bastards that sent you the mail; they have also foolishly paid return postage. Set this gem aside for the moment.
Now take the rest of the crap that came in the junk mail, (including the envelope it came in) and tear it up. This is the most fun part.
Once the mail is in nice bite size scraps place it in the return envelope. Place this little darling into your mailbox and flip up the flag.
You have just forwarded all the cost of disposal onto the junk mailer. They will have to pay someone (or run some machine) to open your mail, and then pay to dispose of the confetti that falls out. They also have to pay the postage on this garbage. Not only is this a fun game, the more junk mail you get the fatter you can stuff the little return envelopes. I have stuffed entire catalogs into credit card return envelopes. Use some tape to keep it shut, the fatter the envelope the more the post office will charge the junk mailer.
There is also no reason you cant send the junk mail that didn’t come with a return envelope back to the junk mailer that did send you one. In this way you can send the Pottery Barn catalog back to Visa, and the coupon book back to MasterCard. If each and every one of us moves the cost of junk mail back to the junk mailers we can impose millions of dollars in “fines†on them each year. Imagine how much it is going to cost them to dispose of millions of pounds of scrap paper each year.
The only reason they have not had to pay any of this cost so far is because we have been doing all the disposal or recycling for them. Brothers, sisters, join with me and help me stick it to the junk mailers where it will hurt them most, their wallets.
This is one of the best blog entries I have ever read. I get so freaking much snail mail spam it’s crazy. I shred and shred and shred some more. I absolutely love the idea of looking for the postage paid return envelopes and stuffing them with the shreds. Any time that my schedule allows for it I’m going to be doing this. I can even get my toddler to help me.
Rock On! I get a real thrill out of costing these jerks a lot of money and didn’t realize others were doing it too! These companies are my
daily therapy when I get home from work, but eventually I hope I won’t have to do it! Credit card companies are the WORST!
This is a very good blog, and I had been doing this with my own junk mail. Unfortunately, instead of it being addressed to my name, it comes addressed to “resident.”
You also want to call the catalogs and change your address. Change the address to that of other catalog companies. (Heck, some of the customer service people are so poorly trained, that you can often change your address to that of the same catalog company you are calling!)
So we all start to do this and the only thing that happens is they stop sending postage paid return envelopes. You will never stop the junk. If this makes you feel better, more power to you. I for one value my time more than wasting it on shredding and stuffing junk mail envelopes. This really comes under the category of “Get a life man.”
i had heard about this years ago, and had a wonderful spell of prolly 6-7 months of doing this. that was until i was informed that this is a form of mail fraud, which is a federal offense. i know, i know: arent the bastards guilty of the same thing by sending me unsolicited junk? i say yes, but the catch hinged on the pre-paid postage envelope. that using that envelope in ways other than its intended purposes(es) represented fraud.
i never followed up on this to see/verify its validity. i just stopped doing it.