Thieves won’t let their fingers do the walking
Walking home from work this week, I saw what looked like a parcel on my neighbor’s stoop. Immediately, I started freaking out.
As you may have heard, San Francisco is in the midst of a minor crime epidemic. Christmas is coming, and the “porch pirates” are hard at work.
Just like last year’s car break-in epidemic, this phenomenon seems to be somewhat organized and is often done in groups. My building was recently visited by three men who had knotted scarves over their faces. (All the better to wave hello to our surveillance cameras on their way to gather up everyone’s packages, I guess.)
Since the thieves have graduated from stealing packages off of everyone’s porches to entering buildings and hopping over gates, most of my neighbors have taken steps to prevent their packages from appearing in public. Seeing the parcel on my neighbor’s stoop put me into anxiety overdrive — where could I hide this for her? Then I looked more closely. That was no package. It was a phone Immediately I turned around and walked away.
My poor neighbor. Instead of getting something she wanted, she’d gotten a phone book. Nobody wants those. No doubt she’d left it outside in the desperate hope that someone would steal it.
But as someone who’d just hauled a batch of unwanted phone book deliveries to the trash sorting room, I could have told her that will never, ever happen.
Why do we even get phone books in 2018?
In a time of smartphones and Google, they are wasteful and useless. They’re terrible for the environment. Producing the directories creates millions of tons in greenhouse gases every year. Since they’re made of low-quality paper, they don’t even recycle well.
Once, San Francisco tried to get rid of phone books altogether. In 2011, then-Supervisor David Chiu pushed through legislation to prohibit the distribution of Yellow Pages unless residents specifically asked for their delivery.
But the very next year, the city had to suspend the ordinance, after an appeals court struck down a similar law in Seattle.
Supposedly, there are all kinds of ways you can opt out of receiving the books. But like a lot of consumer optout programs (remember the Do Not Call list?), there’s a lack of enforcement.
That lack of enforcement, plus the fact that there are still a few persistent entities that profit from the advertisements listed in directories, means the big yellow books mysteriously keep appearing at all of our front doors every year. (It’s worth noting that phone companies don’t lobby to keep delivering the residential white pages, which aren’t profitable — in 2011, California regulators approved a request from Verizon to stop delivering those.)
I contacted one of these entities, the Local Search Association. The association is an industry group representing large phone book companies. It’s the group that sued Seattle for trying to run the hated directory dumps out of town.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t agree with my assessment that the phone books are detested door stops that are killing the planet and won’t even be picked up by San Francisco’s greediest thieves.
“Print yellow pages still provide value to local businesses,” said association President Neg Norton. “Not everyone can always be found on Google, and it’s a complex task to optimize listings to show up in search results.”
Norton also referred to a study from Burke, a market research firm, that showed 73 percent of users made a contact, a visit or a purchase after searching in the Yellow Pages. I did a quick search for the study. It appears to have been conducted in 2011, and its funding came from the Local Search Association.
Frankly, I’ll take the results of my own independent study in 2018 — e.g. the trash sorting room in my building and my neighbor’s response — over those assertions.
If you feel the same, consider lobbying your state and federal representatives for a
real opt-out system. The courts have said these companies can continue pestering you in the name of free speech, but there’s no legal authority to prevent government oversight and enforcement of a comprehensive, functioning way to say no.
The alternative is leaving those books on your porch and praying for theft. And from what I’ve seen, even San Francisco’s porch pirates know better than that.
No doubt she’d left the phone book outside in the desperate hope that someone would steal it.