Junk mail
I’m trying to free myself from the constant junk mail flooding my snail mailbox. Isn’t it bad enough I have to hit delete on spam?
I’ve joined GreenDimes, a clearinghouse of junk mail eradication. I’m still working on getting rid of more, because I’m lazy and opting out of a lot of things requires physical mail requests, or in at least one case, $1. I’ll get around to doing the rest of them when I have time.
One thing that has really been bothering me has been the constant credit card offers from United Mileage Plus. I seriously get an offer about twice a month. I know because that’s about as often as I shred my junk mail and receipts.
Well, I’m tired of shredding stuff from United. I’m tired of the waste. I wondered what I could do about it. And then I read a post from 365 Days of Trash.
I followed the directions and it took me less than two minutes to do. The guy on the phone said it’d take up to 90 days for me to stop receiving offers. But I can wait that out.
I lazily wondered, on my own, whether it was even possible to opt out of the mailings, because I almost always fly home on United. And because you agree to sign up for their mileage program, I figured that just meant that you also agreed to be spammed by them constantly.
I’m glad to find there’s an out. Now I just need to finish doing my GreenDimes stuff, and see about getting all those charities sending mailing labels to stop. Really. I can’t afford to send a lot of money, and by now, they’ve all spent more money giving me mailing labels than I’ve ever given them. And the trouble is, if you give money to one organization, you apparently get on a list for a hundred more organizations to beg for money.
Stop it. I can’t imagine anything more annoying than being generous enough to donate money, and be repaid by having your name being sold to countless others. They also don’t make it easy to opt out. Ugh.
Because we recycle paper, I guess I don’t feel too bad about junk mail. We just toss it in the recycle bin. The way I look at it, at least those stupid credit card offers and useless catalogs come to me and not to someone who will put it out with their regular trash. I suppose it might make a difference if I took the time to shred the junk mail first; I don’t like to feel that someone is wasting my time. We do have a shredder, but I just haven’t gotten into the habit of using it. We have become quite a family of recyclers, though.
Identity theft is a fairly big thing out here. I didn’t use to shred my mail, but now I have no choice. It’s not uncommon to see people go through garbage and recycling bins.
As an update, I finished the rest of my GreenDimes opt-outs. It was actually a lot easier than I thought. They have form letters already made for you, instead of having to go to each site and figure out how to do it, etc.
All I needed to do was print the letters out and sign them, and then address the envelopes, stamp them and gone!
Great feeling to reduce junk mail.
And Matt, think about this: recycling is not a loss-free process. You’re still using resources. It makes more sense to stop the junk mail than to recycle it, if you think about it.