I hate junk mail for so many reasons. For one thing, the stacks of unsolicited marketing materials that come through my physical mailbox and my online Inbox go directly into the garbage. It’s a complete waste of resources. This is an issue I wish our politicians would regulate!
Junk mail overflowing on a table bright colors with postcards and advertisement
It’s an economy of scale
The way it works is that big companies buy a whole lot of post cards, brochures, mailer packets to sell their credit cards. They buy in such quantity that the per unit cost is negligible. Then they buy mailing lists. Maybe they steal them. Probably both! They might unknowingly buy lists from hackers.
Let’s look at the industry around junk mail
A massive industry exists around producing the paper I take out of my mailbox and throw directly into the trash. The United States Post Office made $15 billion in 2021 on junk mail—unsolicited advertising. (https://ecocycle.org/eco-living/refuse-and-reduce/stop-junk-mail/junk-mail-facts/ ) And they cut down millions and millions of trees to do it. There are jobs all the way along the process chain from the tree growers to the lumberjacks to the paper mills to the printers to the advertisers to the purveyors of mailing lists and finally the post office workers. Therefore, there are a lot of lives that would be affected if junk mail didn’t exist. But it’s like busywork. We’re destroying the environment to produce this junk nobody wants and paying a lot of people along the way to do their little meaningless task in this giant meaningless endeavor. Of all those billions of unwanted pieces of mail that go out, there is only a tiny 2.9% response rate. WHAT ARE WE DOING?!
Sometimes the junk has information on it I’d rather shred (probably does no good, and I’m maybe I’m being paranoid). So, there’s usually a junk mail pile in the house waiting to be sorted and thrown away, whether in little bity pieces or whole sheets. What really annoys me is the charities whose missions I want to support, but I give them a few dollars and then they bombard me with paper. I don’t continue to support those organizations that waste my money producing junk. Oh sure, it’s useful stuff like mailing labels and calendars. NO! I got six free calendars in the mail last year and I have more address labels than I will ever use.
