Junk Mail: A Problem We Can Fix

I’ve never been the type who was obsessed with tradition. Perhaps it was due to a bit of family dysfunction that tradition was never solidly engrained, or maybe it was just that life changed and the places where I lived changed so often that things were never too rooted. Rather than contemplate this much more, I will just call it a blessing as it has allowed me to be flexible, and to not look at things, no matter how long they’ve been around, as permanent. One thing we don't need around any longer is junk mail.

Junk mail is awful. It is so awful, that I think it should be illegal. Some just accept this as part of life. It’s been there, maybe not forever, but quite some time that it is now just a mainstay in life. I disagree though. I hate it. It is an out-dated form of marketing and it creates a burden for those who do not want it and for the environment in general.

Having lived in a house that had for a number of years been a rental house, and surely some twenty odd people had lived at that address over the last decade, the problem was unavoidable. With that house came a daily flood of mail. And a vast majority of it, conservatively about eighty percent, was addressed to people who no longer lived there. And about ninety percent of that mail was random sales notifications, promotions, solicitations, etc. what is typically referred to as junk mail. It’s not addressed to someone and from someone, it serves a business sales purpose and is sent to mass list of addresses which has been compiled over some period of time.

We had only three occupants in this house, all of us young professionals who had social lives and cared very little about the content of any of these pieces. The result of this was really not too much inconvenience. Someone would have to take this mail, put it in a pile, and in a couple of days when it got big enough, take it out to the recycling bin. Yet for three years this junk mail that nobody wanted continued to arrive on a daily basis.

This should not be taken lightly, just because it is only a minor inconvenience for one person. When you realize the scale of this operation, and that it happens to most households in America on a daily basis, the amount of inconvenience begins to add up. It is a waste of people’s live to have to sort through these items and throw them away. Additionally, each of these (unintended) recipients must pay to dispose of this stuff. Garbage and recycling services aren’t free. How much junk mail gets thrown straight in the bin? How many free trial AOL CDs took this route to a landfill in the '90s. In the same way that companies who pollute the air, because of their trucks or factories should be charged for the amount of carbon output, these companies who send junk mail should also be charged for the burden they are contributing to the system.

I understand that sending things to a person’s house is a legitimate way for a business to connect with customers. Some people actually do like to receive junk mail and look through it. But the same as customers can choose to not listen to the radio, watch TV, drive on streets with billboards, or have companies call their cell phones, they should also have the right to avoid solicitation by post.

So here’s the compromise, it is very simple. It is actually very similar to the ‘unsubscribe’ option that is available, and legally required in marketing and newsletter type emails. Well it’s a little stricter than that.

I am proposing we introduce a law that requires a company who wishes to send junk mail to an address to have permission to send that mail from the occupant for the current year. This process of getting permission should be done through the mail to confirm that the person signing the notice will be the person who lives at that address. This will increase mail in the short run as companies send out the required confirmations to their customer lists, but there will be a dramatic decrease in junk mail in the long run.

Customers who receive a confirmation of permission to send are given a choice to sign and return it indicating that they do in fact live at that address and they do in fact want to receive these solicitations. Or they can simply ignore it like they do probably already do anything else that comes from that company. But without the signed and returned confirmation the company cannot send that type of mail to that address and will be subject to fine for any violations which will be reported by an individual who receives junk mail without having confirmed they wish to.

This idea works because the people who want to keep receiving mail can get it. Those who want to avoid it will simply not return the confirmation and will not have to deal with it again. And the positive confirmation system helps resolve the situation where people move away and leave their incoming subscriptions behind to continue to burden to the subsequent tenants at a rental property. It will cut down on paper waste and ink waste. Those who change their mind can wait until the yearly cycle finishes and simply not return the confirmation the next year. This will also likely fund itself as any costs on the part of the government to setup a reporting hotline and website, and to hire someone to follow up on claims can be funded by fine collections.

Now with any proposed law, someone is always going to object. A pro-business person, for example, might argue that these companies have a right to send the mail as it is a function of their business and they should not have to pay to send these confirmations, hire people to process them and hire more people to store them and retrieve them whenever there is a claim. But I, or maybe an economist, would argue that these companies are currently creating a lot of waste, an externality of this type of sales marketing, which others have the burden of throwing and hauling away and these companies are probably getting off easy in the financial scheme of things.

The other potential economic impacts might include a likely increase the use of online advertisement, which is generally quite friendly for the environment, and could help a little bit with newspaper and magazine ad revenue. Overall this probably won’t help the GDP at all though. Some people from the postal service might complain that this is another attempt to steal business from them. But if we’re paying postal works to be couriers of cold sales messages, then maybe we’re not utilizing the postal system correctly. It is undeniable that the postal service has been hurt be email and the internet, but technological advancements are supposed to replace out-dated methods, and if we’re running out of ways that the postal service is useful, perhaps that is a sign that they just aren’t useful anymore. So I say let’s make our lives a little more convenient, and stop this tired useless wasteful practice of sending out junk mail to people who don’t want it.