I’ve decided to take some action in reducing our incoming catalogs. This will help us reduce our contribution of waste, even if we were largely recycling the catalogs. It will also reduce the amount of mail and paper I have to deal with on a daily basis, and it will reduce the temptation to buy things in the catalogs that I didn’t know I needed until they looked so glossy and perfect on the catalog pages.
I started addressing this by using the website catalogchoice.org. However, Dave alerted me that he recently heard in the news that the Direct Mail Association told their members to go ahead and ignore requests from the site. This is too bad, because it was an easy, clever solution. But it does explain why the catalogs I had submitted were listed indefinitely as “pending” and my requests never seemed to get approved.
So, I took a different approach. Last night I made 10 phone calls to companies and asked to be removed from their mailing lists. This was largely quick, easy, and painless. Most of the customer service reps were very helpful, and since I had the back of the catalog with the customer number, the process was straightforward. Almost all mentioned that I might get another couple of catalogs because they are already printed, and a few asked why I was asking to be removed. But none tried to talk me into staying on the lists, which was really refreshing.
One of the companies I called was actually in charge of lists for several catalogs, which means in total, I removed myself from about 15 catalog lists in less than a hour. It was certainly an hour well spent because it will save me time, money, and effort worth many times that in the future.