General letter to USPS: Please stop spamming me
Printed ad leaflets and flyers that accompany your daily mail came up in conversation at work. We discussed how we wish we could collect it all for a whole year and then dump the amassed spam in front of the corporate headquarters of USPS. “Good luck recycling this, and don’t forget to pay taxes on your gift!”
Of course, I come from a heathen communist country like Sweden where citizens can actually opt out of solicitations and commercial advertising in their mail. Sweden does all kind of gay shit like caring about the environment. They also allow Muslims to build mosques as well as allowing said Muslims to burn down their own mosque for insurance money. It’s a very open-minded country.
Can you imagine how much money and how much paper would be saved if the option to opt out of mail advertising was available?
How can an organization that consumes 444 million gallons of fuel driving 1.25 billion miles per year be given environmental awards?
A large portion of their revenue stems from advertising, $17.4 billion to be exact. That’s sizable amount and I can see why they do not want me to opt out of one of their largest revenue streams.
The postal service pay about 2.1 billion in salary every two weeks, which ends up being around 52 billion dollars per year if we assume that their employees have a two week vacation each year.
Now, there are about 135 million tax payers in the United States, where about 100 million of these actually had a tax liability and paid taxes.
Taking over the entire cost of the salary of USPS employees would cost each tax payer around $43 per month. Totally not worth it. I suppose I will deal with the damn spam. Better that than higher taxes.
I am doing my best to help minimize my environmental impact by having switched to electronic billing and electronic statements with every financial institution and utility bill I can.
Around 90% of the paper in my mailbox goes straight to recycling because it is unsolicited advertising. So please, USPS, think about the wee, cute, cuddly little trees that provide us with oxygen and stop sending me things I don’t want.
Sources:
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/postalfacts.htm, 2010
http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/index.html, 2007
