Reply #20: I acknowledge that if you double the cost of sending junk mail

[customerserviceguy]

some mailers will indeed quit shipping litter. While you clearly advocate the continued destruction of trees and the burning of fossil fuels in order to send garbage around the country, because it's your job to do that, maybe you need to see it from a different perspective.

I have companies sending me catalogs for years after I bought some loss-leader product from them through a deal from BensBargains.net. Now, unless Ben tells me about another such killer deal (usually for some techie toy that I could take or leave) I'm not going to even open up that junk mail. I suppose that as long as you get paid to route it to my home, you really don't care. But taking the larger view, isn't this an incredible waste of resources? Sometimes people need a jolt to get them to re-evaluate their practices.

If gasoline goes up 25-50 cents a gallon, a lot of people look at that and say, "Well, it will be back down again after Labor Day, (or when the new Mid-East conflict fades away, etc,)" and don't change their habits. But if the price goes up 2-3 dollars a gallon, they start figuring out ways to consolidate trips, carpool, etc. That's what stupid advertisers need, a kick in the pants that tells them to really think hard about the crap mail they scattergun the country with.

I simply cannot imagine FedEx, UPS, or some other new private provider that would have to be created out of thin air delivering junk mail at a rate even twice what the USPS currently charges, so you'll still have the business, since you've still got the infrastructure in place. But as that infrastructure deteriorates, perhaps it should not be replaced, only repaired. We're coming to a place where the only useful things that will be delivered by human courier are packages. While you would like to see dead-tree advertising continue to pollute the planet, I'd rather see us phase away from it.

Besides, if your pension and health care plans really are as overfunded as you think they are, what do you have to worry about?