Huffington Post -- Junk Mail's Endless Summer
,May 12th, 2009
Happy postage increase day: Today the cost of a first-class stamp increases to 44 cents, the third increase in as many years. Though forty-four cents is not terribly expensive, you could be paying as little as 14 cents if you were sending junk mail to total strangers. And this summer, while you and I are once again shelling out a little bit more, the United States Postal Service is sweetening the deal for the junk mail industry: a whopping 30% discount is being given to junk mailers who send more junk mail than they did last summer.
The Postal Service, one of our proudest public services, has turned itself into a junk mail delivery service.
Fully 30% of all the mail in the world is US junk mail. It's been a daily annoyance for so long that many of us think of junk mail like bad weather: it's annoying, but also inevitable. Telemarketing calls at dinnertime used to annoy us too, but the Do Not Call Registry put an end to that. We can do the same for junk mail.