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December 28, 2008
Stop the Catalog Madness!
We get a lot of mail-order catalogs at our house. For whatever reason or past sin, our mailman comes bearing some catalog or another nearly every day. As an experiment, I decided to keep every single catalog we received between the day after Thanksgiving ("Black Friday") and Christmas to see just how many we get during this most joyous of holiday seasons.
And here's the resulting pile:
Yes, that's over 12" of catalogs...121 in total...
...weighing in at a mind-boggling 34 lbs!
This is absurd on several fronts. First, we have never ordered from probably 90% of these companies, and likely never will. Second, several companies sent us multiple copies of the same catalog on the same day. What purpose does that serve, other than to illustrate how bad your marketing department's data-mining efforts are? Third, we received at least five different catalogs from several firms in this one-month period; if the first four catalogs didn't catch our eye, believe me, it's unlikely we're even going to look at the fifth.
In this age of heightened awareness towards ecological and energy concerns, it seems ridiculous that such wasteful physical marketing efforts would not only be tolerated, but be encouraged by discounted postal rates for materials like this. If it cost these companies the same per pound to ship these as it does for you and I to ship something, I guarantee you we'd see fewer of them in our mailboxes.
Posted by Craig in Industry
and Other
and Science & Nature
and Society / Politics
Comments
No kidding!!! We get a otn of these all the time...its crazy!
Posted by: jenny at December 28, 2008 9:23 PM