… and Roscoe, Charlie, & Frankie too.
Monthly Archive for December, 2007
Overheard at Kiki & Herb: The Second Coming, Carnegie Hall, 12/12/07
Waiting in the men's room line at intermission:
Oh, by the way, my Radical Faerie name is Hand. You can call me Hand.
This night, the men's room line was wayyyy longer than the women's.
After receiving 23 mail-order catalogs in three days, I started hitting the customer service websites, sending a saccharine plea to help me reduce the amount of paper mail I receive, how much I love their products, but prefer to shop online.
This approach got me responses in almost every case, including a few who thanked me for sharing their concern with saving the environment.
It is however, tiring. Hardly any site offers a dedicated mailing list removal form, instead requiring writing to the Customer Service "Contact Us" people or combing their Privacy Policy for removal instructions. Exceptions are Gumps and Brookstone, which each feature the vague subject "Mailing List" as a Contact Us concern; Signals, who goes a step farther and offers "Remove from Postal List" as a subject; Lands' End, whose Privacy Policy has a whole paragraph subtitled "Removing your name from mailing lists", and Eddie Bauer, who will remove you if you write online and ask, even though their site asks you to call them or pay $1 to get on the DMA Do Not Mail list.
But then tonight, the local news introduced me to CatalogChoice.org, a free, non-profit service that has done everything exactly right. Wowie, what a great site. It's concise, cute, has fast ajaxy navigation with slick-but-not-distracting transition efx, and is really really usable.
After getting an account, you just Find Catalogs. I haven't found one yet not listed (tho if you do you can suggest it be added). When you find a catalog to decline, a Lightbox-esque form pops up where you select your name and address matching the catalog's mailing label, and enter your Customer Number, if any. Your profile can hold multiple names and multiple addresses, so I can easily pair either Mike or myself with all variations of our address that appear.
Best of all, they do all the work and notify the companies for you! All your declined catalogs are listed on one page, which is also the page where you report anyone who still sends junk after 10 weeks. Each company's name has a hotlink to their online store, so you can continue to shop at the places you love, but hate their paper waste.
