How to Stop Receiving Trash Mail
I sift through a load of useless (tangible) mail every single day, the majority of my mail is stuff that I end up recycling. The ratio is about 5:1, meaning I typically open 1 out of 5 mail items that actually looks important. Then, half the time these opened items turn out to be crap masked in potential importance. Do any of you go through the same thing?
Do you ever think about how you end up getting all this useless mail? It’s basically spam. You trash the spam you get in your e-mail inbox just like you trash the useless mail. So how do you avoid getting more of this trash?
Stop giving out your identity in conjunction with the items you consume. Here’s an idea:
Stop swiping your Safeway Club Card or entering your phone number during every purchase. Instead, request to use the house card.
Ususally employees at these supermarkets are trained to allow the customer to use the house card. Why should you do this?
Every time you swipe your Safeway Club Card, Mr. Safeway and all his friends are informed of:
1) the items you need and consume, and
2) your residential address
Now Mr. Safeway and his friends can send you some ‘gifts’! Typically, this ends up being irrelevant mail and such. Believe it or not, your information is actually very valuable to these companies. Because of your purchasing data, these companies can make a better decision of how to target you. Your saving $ comes at the expense of releasing your consumer activity.
The point: Keep getting the discounts without the influx of trash mail.
Yes, they are correlated.
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November 16th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Why not just give bogus information when filling out the card app>
November 16th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Here’s another tip: if you ever register a domain name, always, always, always pay more for the privacy protection on your WHOIS data. I once registered a domain for a class project with the company name “The Weightmate Pro” (weightmatepro.com) and to this day I still get junk mail for this “company”. I receive tons of small business credit card applications where it will have my name and then right underneath it will have my company’s name. I receive tons of ads from Office Max and Staples that try to sell me furniture and stationaries.
There are companies out there that crawl the web to grab WHOIS data so they can sell the information to advertisers. It’s absolutely despicable and I urge all of you to pay the extra couple dollars to get your WHOIS data blocked!
Kev
November 17th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
I haven’t started recieving junk mail yet and I use my safeway club card. Maybe I’m lucky? Doubt it. Thanks for the tip though :)
Tennis anyone?