Nothing But Junk Mail
May 30th, 2007 by Alex
“Life’s too short to clean your own house,” proclaims an ad for a cleaning company that was mailed to me. I’d argue that I don’t care enough pay someone else to clean my own house. Part of owning a home is taking care of it (or opting not to take care of it). I have the time to clean the house; I just choose not to do it all that often. No cut-rate advertisement is going to make me feel guilty about it.
Now for something completely unrelated to the topic… this beer pong table has got to be the more elaborate I’ve ever seen. Unreal.
Roger S. Horvath sent me not one letter, but TWO letters expressing suprise “that someone with [my] consistent devotion to paying [my] mortgage on time has not yet refinanced to a fixed-rate mortgage at a **5.625%** APR.” Suprise suprise, Roger! Printed on mortgage company letterhead and dated May 21st, both have Mr. Horvath’s initials written in pen. Fancy, except that the handwriting on each is completely different. So much for that personal touch. Worse than that was the horrendously enlarged and bolded font, proclaiming the following:
* Remember that the only individuals who do not qualify
for savings
* Are the those who do not make the call!! *
Read that again, carefully. I do wish advertisers would express some relatively consistent devotion to grammar and keeping tabs on who they’ve mailed in the past period. They spent time becoming a BBB member but didn’t have the common sense to read their copy before printing it. If you want to sell me, you’ve got to be smooth. Start with eliminating typos and grammatical mistakes from your copy. As much as it irritates me that mortgage information is public record, you’re going to have to do more than run a report on my mortgage history to earn my business.
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Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent “Do not mail” is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing - and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today’s [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today’s merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman’s mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer’s right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel