Why are Americans still ignoring our junk mail?
Fourteen years ago, my wife’s high school friend’s mother gave us a wedding present — a dozen hand-crafted rattan placemats from Ballard Designs. This was exceedingly kind of someone I had never even met, and it did launch my momentary vision of a fictional table setting, candles fluttering around a roast goose. But before we’d need said placemats, we’d need actual plates, and so this became a gift exchange.
Though we have never shopped with Ballard Designs since, and though my wife has tried to cancel it half a dozen times, a catalog keeps rolling in each month, like a horror film villain slowly suffocating us with throw pillows. Someone at the far end of the ether has decided it best to put this into my hand, and so physically task me with the ritual of waste.
How many glossy things like this have I let slip into the recycling bin? I look at a happy caravan joggling in their Jeep and attractive fleeces, and then I look away as I dump them onto their trail to the landfill.
This has become automatic behavior to almost anyone. Each year, more than 100 billion pieces of junk mail are stuffed into U.S. mailboxes. We respond by dumping 44% of them unopened, into the garbage, putting a billion more pounds on the backs of those who collect it. For all the $5 bills sent from grandma and the care packages to camp, the USPS has ostensibly become a real-life mailbox with no spam filter. In 1972, only a quarter of all mail qualified as junk mail; by 2019, it was 63%. Never mind that the term has been scrubbed to “direct mail.” It’s almost all unsolicited.
It’s no longer the ‘90s — by next year, our country should hit the 300 million mark for online shoppers — so why are we still getting all those copies of athleisure wear adverts? While down from its peak of 19 billion in 2007, the U.S. still mails about 11 billion catalogs annually, algorithmed ever more precisely toward their target audiences. Bridget Johns, head of customer engagement at Retail Next, sees this as a way to “keep that conversation going” with the customer.
Better than websites, over which users can choose their own adventure, catalogs allow companies to project their aesthetic and aspirational worlds unabated. Though I can’t ever recall purchasing anything there, I just got a catalog from Faherty — “The highest-quality clothing with a laidback sensibility.” It pretty much invited me on their road trip: “To celebrate the changing seasons, we brought the family up to Connecticut for a mini-reunion filled with hiking, cooking, and, of course, marshmallow roasting.” How did they know — I love s’mores!
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was maligned in 2012 when he said elderly Americans “love to get junk mail” and feel it’s “their only way of communicating and feeling they’re part of the real world.” But particularly as the pandemic has promoted senior citizen lifestyles among more of us, he does have a point. According to the USPS inspector general, the ratio of advertising mail to personal correspondences is 18 to 1.
Just last month, President Biden did sign a Postal Service Reform Act. Given the agency’s $80 billion long-term debt, it was really a measure to keep the nation’s third-largest employer afloat, mostly by restructuring employee health benefits. Notre Dame management professor James O’Rourke feared the agency could “go out of business” within a year without this intervention. Nothing about direct mail was mentioned, though perhaps now is not the right time to question this, for it currently accounts for about a quarter of
USPS revenue.
But if not now, when?
I like my mail carrier. I see her almost every day, walking up my neighbor’s many steps, sorting through the bins in her nonidling truck. I’ve learned about her kids (roughly the age of my own), her dog, where she wants to go on vacation. No, I don’t want her to lose employment, and I do want her to carry essential items. But for the sake of our kids, I also would prefer that the 100 million trees that create direct mail each year stay in the ground. And I do wonder whether, in 20 years when her knees still feel the weight of all those Restoration Hardware catalogs, whether it will have been worth it after all.
Mass marketers expect that more than 97% of direct mail will not create a positive response. Imagine ringing on 25 doorbells before one person gave you the time of day! If this were a story about something else, it could win Oscars for its model of gritty persistence. Instead, it’s a story about our collective, inured negligence about something that is slipping out of our hands every day.
Donahue teaches high school English at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and works with his local Clean Air Collective.