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What About This…? 6.5.2014

By Wayne William Cipriano

How do you feel about junk mail? I really like it! When I am lucky I find 8 ½” x11” sheets of paper that are printed on one side only that can be used for carbon copies when typing. Even when the blank-on-one-side sheets are smaller they serve as notepaper. (I haven’t purchased a notepad in decades).

Paper printed on both sides gets balled up and used to start fires in the wood furnace, as does newsprint after every single word has been read. The complimentary magazines, store flyers and such that are printed on slick paper used to be a hassle until the recycling center began accepting it and I presume selling it for reuse. Now it is sort of like being the middleman in a philanthropic exchange between advertisers and DoCo.

You can offer the most brightly colored junk mail to the grandkids to cut into interesting shapes and decorate packages and greeting cards they make.

Unfortunately, over the last few years, probably due to the advent of Internet advertising, it seems the amount of junk mail we receive has been reduced and all the above uses for it have suffered. We are told this reduction has saved countless trees, but I often wonder how much environmental conservation propels the shift to the Internet and how much is the result of increased postal fees.

Now that I think of it, those of us who use junk mail to our advantage are not the only ones damaged by the attraction of Internet advertising. I would bet the Internet is the worst thing to happen to the United States Postal Service since the demise of the Sears Roebuck Catalog.