Direct mail contract likely to further add to junk mail jams
Roberto M. Esquivel/HeraldStandard.comrd.com
Lila Ewart of Continental 2 exits the Uniontown post office with a handful of circulars and coupon pages.
Lila Ewart of Continental 2 exits the Uniontown post office with a handful of circulars and coupon pages.
Vanessa Riedmann of Uniontown looks the through the many pieces of junk mail she recieves daily at her Uniontown business.
Carrie Brown Attaway of Uniontown leafs through the nearly three weeks of circulars and coupon pages she receives in the mail. Attaway stated that every few weeks she gathers the junk mail she has accumulated and shreds it.
Some people shred it. Others use it to line flowerpots or bird cages. Some don’t even look at it before throwing it away.
Junk mail, by way of coupon fliers, catalogs, circulars, credit card offers and other unsolicited items, was panned recently as not only a personal annoyance, but an environmentally unfriendly nuisance.
“I get so many coupons at my apartment it’s ridiculous. If I don’t get my mail every day, it won’t fit,” said Vanessa Riedmann of Uniontown. “You can’t even find your bills in there without digging through it.”
Riedmann and many others soon could see the volume of junk mail increase dramatically.
In August, the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission approved a three-year reduced contract rate between the U.S. Postal Service and Valassis Direct Mail. The company is responsible for the Red Plum inserts that already come in the mail, and with the reduced rate contract, could send out even more direct mail inserts.
To get the three-year discount, however, Valassis must increase its mailings by 1 million pieces of mail over the next year. If Valassis doesn’t meet that number, the Michigan-based company would have to pay the Postal Service a $100,000 penalty.
The Postal Service has estimated the deal could mean $15 million in revenue over the three-year contract.
“It enrages me that we pay our postal employees to handle such bulk mail from marketers and offer lower rates for buyers of bulk mail permits, which come into our homes unsolicited and unwanted,” said Traci Klink of Uniontown.
When Klink gets to her mailbox after a long day of work, she said she’s often frustrated.
“I find it filled to the brim with junk mail, credit card offers and unsolicited mail from just about every service offered. One-hundred million trees are processed to send such advertisements and junk mail every four months. That’s equivalent to clear-cutting more than 265,000 acres,” she said.
“I get 15 items in my mailbox at home. I need two of them,” Riedmann said. “It’s a waste of trees and bad for the environment. We’re all trying to be green these days — let’s stop sending so much stuff.”
Riedmann said she not only gets mail at her home, but also at her business, Vanessa’s Hair Studio on West South Street in Uniontown.
“Half the stuff I don’t even open or look at,” Riedmann said.
Outside the post office on East Fayette Street in Uniontown, Lila Ewart of Continental 2 held an arm full of circulars and coupon pages.
“It’ll just be garbage. It’s a waste,” she said.
Ewart said she finds her post office box stuffed with junk mail at least twice a week.
If more comes, she said she would just continue to do what’s she’s always done — pitch it or shred it.
Carrie Brown Attaway of Uniontown stores her junk mail in recyclable bags. Every six weeks, she combines the volume she gets at home with work-related paperwork. A shredding service comes to pick up the big, blue drawstring bags.
“I stand at my front door, pull the mail out of my mailbox, and one by one, put them in a bag,” she said. “Email would be simpler. Then I could just delete it.”
Looking over her bag of mail, Attaway furrowed her brow.
“I don’t even know what this is,” she said, pulling one unsolicited offer out of the bag. “Sometimes, I look at them, but most of the time, I just throw them all in.”
While more mail would be more sorting of the keep-versus-toss items, Attaway said she’ll ultimately just be adding more to her shredding bags.
There are several services available to stop junk mail from coming into your box completely.
Bill Brown, owner of StopTheJunkMail.com, does all the leg work to stop all of those things for a yearly cost of $19.95.
“We send out a stop notice to the company, and take care of getting the mail stopped,” he said. “It works out well. Once you start using the service, it takes about six months to stop the mail. Once you have the stop order, it takes companies some time to purge your name and address from their list.”
But if coupons, like the Red Plum circulars, are what plague you, the how-to website www.bukisa.com has a step-by-step process for getting off of the Valassis mailing list. The content can be found by searching for “Valassis mailing list” in the site’s search bar.
Klink, meanwhile, wondered what would happen if the money spent on unwanted junk mail could make a positive difference.
“Perhaps if we find a way to cut down on all the unsolicited junk mail that we receive in a day, week, year… we could lend a hand with all the personal and business debt that millions are facing today. We could save millions of trees. We wouldn’t waste the time of our postal employees. There would be less waste in our landfills. And we wouldn’t waste any more time searching for contact information to ‘opt out’ or on the phone with customer service that doesn’t respond to your request anyway,” Klink said.