Im more shocked by the world of direct mail advertising. I constantly receive important and substantive looking letters from banks, car insurance, car warranty resellers that are all aiming to trigger a negative emotional reaction (urgency) so you open their mail and don’t throw it immediately in the trash.
The sheer volume of junk mail I receive and its toll on the environment throughout the entire chain honestly makes me shudder.
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Probably my "favorite" out direct mail advertising these are home warranty companies. We bought our home and immediately after, started getting letters about home warranties. They take all the info from public record but they always do something to make it look like it's a bill from the government or some other "official" source. Some of my favorites:
- "FINAL NOTICE" printed on the letter (spoiler alert it's not the final notice)
- Use that paper that you have to rip on either side to open.
- Print the name of your mortgage company and other information to make it seem that they have info on you (all public record). Occasionally they will also print a "case number" which I assume is just some random numbers and letters.
I think the first one I got gave me a spook until I looked at the bottom and saw in 5pt print "we are not affiliated with any mortgage company or government agency, we are a home warranty service bla bla bla". Since then it's honestly kind of humorous to get one and see what tricks they tried to pull.
I recently purchased/sold a home so I went through this a few times now. The warranties, title search, etc direct mail people are annoying.
However, the actual ads for moving companies was great. I just got a stack of 30 moving company post cards, sorted it out by gut feeling basically, and started calling. It was a lot more efficient than google search.
I'm thankful that the name of my mortgage company is different from the slug they report publicly because it makes it very easy to discern garbage. Like somehow I don't think that this message from APPL is legit.
A particularly egregious example is that once you get a mortgage you'll get flooded with hundreds of letters over years bearing the name of your mortgage company in the top left corner of the window claiming to be extremely urgent. If you look closely at these mailers you'll note that the name of the mortgage company isn't quite where the return address should be, and if you open the mailer and read the fine print they do finally disclaim being the mortgage company, but they're intentionally designed to mislead you into thinking they're from your company in a way that really ought to be illegal but isn't.
I found a small trick that much of the most junky mail doesn't get delivered to business addresses, and so I forwarded all my mail to my business address. This worked for a little while, and greatly reduced the amount of junk mail I received. But the US post office only lets you forward for a limited amount of time (or makes you pay a ridiculously high price to keep doing it).
At that point, I just took down my mailbox and changed my address on all my bills and such to my work address. This lead to the USPS reporting to HUD that my house was abandoned. That got forwarded to the bank that holds my mortgage, who freaked out. I got them calmed down, but then went through a period of having to explain to quite a few people why I don't have a mailbox. I got accused of being selfish and of being a luddite. I got told it was illegal. I basically was shamed about it endlessly.
After ten years, I finally just put a mailbox back up at my house because my son, who just turned eighteen and was applying for credit cards and such, ran into issues where he couldn't receive them because he had no residential mailbox and the banks told him "tough luck".
Did not having a mailbox interfere with deliveries?
I'd guess that FedEx and UPS don't care, but many online sellers (such as Amazon) don't let you choose which carrier they use for your shipment and sometimes choose USPS.
If any piece of mail has “standard postage” stamped on it on the top right, throw it in the trash. Any legitimate mail has “first class” stamped on it.
That mail comes with rules. It presorted and so even though it is a lot cheaper to mail for them, because everything is in order there is a lot less work for the mail system and so they still make money on it in general.
In the digital world FIGMA - Is by far the worst at adding monthly users to your account, without clear indication that it’s happened and they make it incredibly difficult to find where to unsubscribe those users as an Admin