Stuff You Should Know - How Junk Mail Works

Episode Date: February 26, 2009

Almost no one likes junk mail. It's seen as wasteful, unproductive and -- potentially -- harmful. Listen in as Josh and Chuck take a closer look at the nature and effects of junk mail in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And I'm me. Sorry, I was going to do the thing. And I'm Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That was totally off the cuff, I don't think we should say. I think it's pretty obvious.

Chuck, have you ever been to Austin, Texas? Yeah, I love Austin. I've heard nothing but good things keep Austin weird and all have never been. Yep, very cool. Very cool sound. But I do know that if you go to Austin, Texas right now, and you go to MLK Boulevard near the corner of Alexander Avenue, you're gonna find a little gallery. And it is called the Flatbed Press Art Gallery. Interesting. And if you go into there, like I said right now, you're going to find a piece of art in art installation. It's called Free Paper. Have you heard of this? Yes, because you told me.

Well, I'll tell everybody else then. There's a woman named Annette Lawrence. And she's a Texas artist, right? And basically what she did was she saved a year's worth of junk mail. Right. And it came to total 265 pounds, by the way. Just junk mail. Goodness. And she tore it into two inch strips and then basically installed it, put it together in stacks by month, and then put it on shelves. So there's 12 little separate, it's almost like a cross section of junk mail. Right. And the way she did it, I wouldn't have thought to do it this way, but it really gets the point across with minimal space. It's quite beautiful until you think about, you know, it's junk mail. Right. So as I understand, she's not the only junk mail artist

that's going on right now. No. It's surprising. There's a bunch. And I have another one here, and her name is Barbara Hashimoto, an American artist. And she works with junk mail. She does provocative like art installations, a little interactive type of thing. She's a provocateur. She's a provocateur. And what she's done, and this is generally like most junk mail artists, are probably making a political statement, an environmental statement. And that's what she's doing. And she is in Chicago, and she set aside the junk mail from her business for a year. So it was quite a bit more obviously than a person would get. And she ended up with 3,000 cubic feet of, then she shredded it actually, with a paper shredder. She had one called

junk mail with grand piano. And what she would do is she got this piano player with a grand piano and put him in a room facing a street with glass that people could see in obviously. And he would start playing this symphony, not symphony, but some nice piano music. Sound like it's such a lunkhead there. I'm a musician too. And so he's playing the piano, and she starts dumping the shredded junk mail on him and on the piano as he's doing it. And basically, it's a process. And at the end of it, this guy can't even be heard anymore. He's completely covered. The piano's completely covered. And you hear just these little muffled hammered sounds of the piano string and it's over. That definitely gets the point across,

doesn't it? Yeah. So it's pretty cool. Okay. So for the rest of us who have neither the time nor the inclination to play with junk mail, right? Right. And make statements with junk mail, I should say. You know, obviously it's annoying. I shouldn't even say that. It's just so blatantly obvious. But it's also kind of harmful. Junk mail is harmful. Extremely. Number one, you can very easily become the victim of identity fraud just from pre-approved credit card applications. I think there's something like 400,000 cases of identity theft every year that are attributed just to pre-approved credit cards. Interesting. That's a Cig Kirchner, by the way. That's his figure. Okay. He's a consumer guru. That's good. Yeah. So that's a

problem right there. Yeah. Well, you know, people, my wife is a master shredder. She is on top of our household as far as the mail and the bills. And she shreds everything like that. She shreds things that I've been like, oh, this is stupid. You don't need to shred my sports illustrated re-up thing. And she will. Yeah. And coincidentally, we've never had our identity stolen. So people that just toss that, I know, people that just toss that into the trash, it's really not very smart. No, it's not. I usually burn mine. Oh, that's good. Seriously. Just out of spite. Well, I don't have a shredder, but I don't want to just toss it in the trash either. So you heat your home with it? Or sometimes this is kind of weird, but sometimes I will take the most sensitive parts of it and

tear it off and then eat it. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. No going through that trash, pal. Well, that actually, what she said before about burning it leads me to an interesting stat that I've just flown in from the home office. Let's hear it. 250,000 homes can actually be heated from a single day's worth of junk mail in the United States. By burning it? That would be awful. Not a single household, obviously. It's all the junk mail in the country. Right. So. But I'm saying, I don't think we should be setting this on fire, right? Well, no, it's just to kind of drive the point home. Oh, gotcha. Four million tons a year in the United States alone. And a final stat, Josh, if you're interested. Oh, of course. 44. And this is a really sad one. 44% of all

junk mail goes unopened and is put into a landfill eventually. Yes. And, Chuck, I have another stat for you. This is our stat heavy junk mail podcast special. Did you know that with the amount of paper that's thrown out by Americans every year. Through junk mail or just paper? Well, junk mail is part of it. This includes junk mail. This is just paper, but it's going to leave me back around in a second. So, so bear with me. You could build a 12 foot tall wall from New York to Los Angeles. Really? That's annually. They should build that wall. Think about how incredibly thin paper is. Yeah. You can make it 12 feet tall and all the way from New York to LA. How thick? I guess paper width. Yeah. Okay. That would be much of a wall. No,

no, no. I mean, like you're laying a piece of paper flat on the ground and stacking them up all 12 feet tall. So it'd be what eight and a half inches wide. I thought you were taping it all together. So it'd be, you could just poke your finger. That would be stupid. Well, this is the clean air council. I would like to think that they wouldn't toy with me like that. But, you know, as always, as Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies and statistics. You should always take statistics with a grain of salt. But how about this? Clearly, there is a ton of junk mail that's wasted every year. Can we agree on that or million times? Yes, that is a statistic too. Yes. Okay. So you've got credit card fraud. You've got waste,

but not just waste. It's also input. You have to consider the input. It takes a tremendous amount of water actually to make paper, which is kind of odd because paper is dry. But to separate the fibers and make this into a pulp, they add tons of water. There's actually a process where they first they wash wood off, right? Okay. Get all any impurities out. They send it into a steamer for four hours. Then they chop it up and turns into a pulp. And then they add water to the a ratio of about 200 to one, 200 parts water to one part pulp. Wow. Yeah. And then they dry it out. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it

as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God, talk about walking into the devil's den. The car kills. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester, he never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA, pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh, no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen to murder in Miami on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children, and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mt. Mags was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter, Josie Duffy Rice, and in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids

to a nightmare, and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed. Listen to unreformed on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right? Were you laughing at my amazement? No, I was laughing at this astronomical use of water to make paper, right? And then they dry it out, and when they're drying it out, they're actually using steam heated rollers. So there's more water right there. And there's another part to the end before they do the final dry, where they add more water and then dry it out to make it slick and glossy. Wow. Yes. So that's a lot of water. Of course, a lot of trees are used specifically for paper. Right. About a hundred million a year. Is that right? That's what the

University of Oregon says, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's a lot of trees. It is a lot of trees. And it's kind of sad to think about it, but there's many are grown specifically to become paper, right? Yes. I must say that paper mills do reuse water. Oh, they do. Just for cost-effectiveness. Right. Of course. So they are reusing water, but still there's 28 billion gallons of water used annually to produce paper. Right. That's a lot. That's input. So if they're reusing it, they're still using a lot of water. Right. And I hate to use they. I don't mean to be inclusive and exclusive and in-group and out-group. The paper industry is just the evil tobacco industry. God knows they're evil. You're holding paper right now. I am holding paper. I use paper,

but I recycle all paper. Yeah, me too. We have that single stream recycling thing where all the waste baskets at the desks are basically recycling. I never throw anything away in there. It's only paper. Yeah. I practice what I preach, friend. That's good. I'm not calling you to desk, buddy. That's fine. I can settle down because my fight-or-flight response is just pumping. I know. It's kicked in. Okay. So Chuck, it's a waste, right? Right. It's annoying. It's potentially threatening as far as finances go with identity threat. Yeah. What can an individual do to fight the good fight against direct mail? Well, which, by the way, can give you one more figure. Yeah. Yeah. This is a figure, not a stat. Okay. So it's much more reliable. First of all,

did you even know that there's such a thing as direct mail pharmaceuticals? No. You get pills through the mail? No, you can get pills through the mail. Yes, but this is like advertising, direct mail advertising for pharmaceuticals. Interesting. I have never gotten one. I don't know. It's probably because I don't have a primary position, but the direct mail pharmaceutical market alone in 2008 racked up $10.6 billion in sales based specifically on direct mail. Wow. Their return on investment for $1 was $10.27. Every dollar they spent on direct mail advertising racked them in $10.27 in 2008. That's just one sector. Wow. We're in the wrong business, buddy. Totally. I've always said we need to start making our own pharmaceuticals

and selling them. This podcast you get is just not paying. We're not making $10 billion. I'll tell you that or anything actually. So what can be done? I'm going to leave the second part to you about the official websites and things. I thought you left the first part to me. No. I'm going to go with the first part. One thing you can do is you can actually send it back. This is not about stopping it from coming to your home, but instead of being angry and just burning it or whatever you do, shooting it with your gun, eating it and processing it through your own miserable body. Some ink is better than others. I can tell you that. I bet. You can actually send it back. Junk mail is usually first class or third class, which is called bulk rate. And if your envelope

is stamped, address, correction, requested, or return postage guaranteed, you can return it unopened to the sender by writing refused return to sender on the envelope. Stick it back in your mailbox and flip up your little flag. Oh, flag. I didn't think you were going to say flag. Yes, flip up your flag. Gotcha. But you can only do this on bulk mail with that special notification on it. If you have a solicitation, sorry, that has postage paid reply envelope, then just put a note saying that you want to be removed from the mailing list and include that mailing label and or write refused on it. And you might actually get taken off that list. So that's one way to do it. Well, thanks to our friend, the internet, it's gotten a lot

easier to stop getting junk mail, right? Yes. There are actual sites that are dedicated to you not getting junk mail. And remember the do not call registry, right? Well, there's been several attempts to create a, you know, do not mail registry, basically. And it hasn't taken off. It may in the future. Who knows. But as it stands for now, it's up to the individual to take care of their own junk mail stream, right? Right. And like I said, the internet is a great tool for that. They're like opt out pre screen.com is one place you can go. And basically, the reason we have junk mails, because your name and address and personal information is actually valuable. It's valuable on its own in a very small amount, fractions and fractions

of a cent as a single individual. True. When you put it together with thousands and tens and thousands and hundreds of thousands of other people, millions, millions, well, I'll go with millions. Sure. Then all of a sudden that list as a whole becomes valuable, right? So people who have your information or millions of people's information can put these things together, make some extra scratch on the side by selling it to direct marketers, right? And one group that aggregates these, this information are credit reporting bureaus. They are allowed by law to give out certain personal information about you, like name, address, preferences, stuff that you've provided to sell it for their own behalf. You get absolutely nothing for it. Except junk mail.

And they make money off of it. Yeah. And what you get in the end is junk mail. So the opt out pre screen.com website basically makes it so the four major credit reporting bureaus can't sell your stuff any longer. Right. And it'll take a little while to get off the lists, but you will eventually hopefully be purged. And that lasts for five years. Or I think you can also do a lifetime block on selling. Why wouldn't you just do that? That'd be great. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. In five years, I might want to get this junk mail. So I'll just go with the five. Well, you know, actually there are, there's this group called the direct market association. And they may be the bane of most people's existence.

How's that? Because they're actually a trade association of direct marketers. Right. Right. And luckily they have a nice little website that you can access to get out to opt out. It's called DMA consumers.org. And they have basically the same thing that you'll find at opt out pre screen. They have 5200 member companies. And it's not just for profit business, non profits, political action groups are members of the DMA. And when you get taken off the DMAs list, you get taken off of all these people's mailing lists. Right. So that's another thing you can do in 1980 cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it

as the Wild Wild West unleashing a wave of violence. My God, talking about walking into the devil's den. The car kills. They just killed everybody that was home. They started pulling out pictures of Clay Williams body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen to murder in Miami on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mount Mags was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed.

Listen to unreformed on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There's steps you can take or actually there's steps that you cannot take right that can keep you off right warranty cards warranty cards like think about this when I researched this article I hadn't thought about it at the time and I thought back to you know when I filled out in a warranty card because I must admit I am one of the suckers who actually has filled out a warranty card and melded in why the Cuisinart company whose blender I just purchased would care whether my household would be most interested in hunting and fishing magazines or skydiving magazines like it didn't dawn on me at the time like that's a little odd and I think I even remember people checking a

box right like well you know we're not really into hunting and fishing but we're more into skydiving these days so check you know and and then all of a sudden like I got skydiving magazine commons you know there's a master card is sending me like a pre-approved card with a skydiver I like we know you'll like this sucker and it's it's it's bad so never fill out a warranty card because you know we talked about extended warranties before right you have your receipt that your warranty card you are that's your warranty because if they say you're you have a warranty you have the receipt then you have the warranty you don't need to fill out a card to ensure that you have the warranty exactly it's just a big scam it is a huge scam you know those

bits that uh sometimes you'll hear like the morning radio shows do where they'll call like the head of the telemarketing company at you know midnight and wake him up and say how do you like it you do know your company and all that stuff we should find out the person there's one person I'm sure where all the junk mail originates find out where this dude lives and let's just go and like like wallpaper his house with uh grocery store flyers his name is rusty yeah he would rusty would wake up and try to look out his window and all he would see is like ground beef dollar 99 he'd be like a piano player with a bunch of junk mail dumped on him right in here as screams sorry rusty exactly you brought this on yourself rusty um chuck we're not quite done here okay there's other

there's actually businesses that you can subscribe to that will go to the trouble of getting you off lists true and our producer recommended one yeah um it's green dimes we believe um and basically our producer Jerry said that she there's a free service um where you you can just kind of I guess do the basic job right uh but there's their $20 annual membership fee actually these people actively work if they can't send something in on your behalf like it needs your signature maybe your social security number right which you will be asked for once in a while sure this is not you being lured into an even bigger scam right um but they need it for verification I'm not certain that they need it but they require it for verification so if green dimes can't just do it as a third

party telling somebody else to back off they send you all the stuff that you like these form letters right you sign mail them back to them and green dime mails it for you right and then they monitor and by the way I don't own any stock in green dimes or anything I'm just kind of taken by this company they may not be publicly traded anyway they uh well my dad didn't found it if that's what you mean okay um the uh they they monitor all these lists um mailing lists uh every every month on a monthly basis to make sure your name stays off and if not they go after the people for you but that's worth 20 bucks a year if you ask me and they plant five trees when you join really yep oh well there you have it four bucks a tree yeah that's awesome sure it depends on the tree yeah that's

true I'm gonna sign up for that I didn't know about that yeah and and remember never fill out a warranty card don't never respond to a publisher's clearinghouse sweepstakes yeah anything what happens uh what does it say on the you may have already won yeah but a lot of times it's not even your name it'll just say occupant or something like that yeah if you respond to that you will end up on what's called a sucker list right and and that's actually what it's called in the industry um because you have shown that you're a gullible and your junk mail will increase tremendously yeah and your name pops up on the sucker list and that's when all these companies go oh we got one we got one exactly let's get in there yeah that's the uh that's the lead of leads right there right and that's my

impression of a junk mail dude yeah it was good thanks so there you go um I also want to recommend an article on MSNBC by uh sig kersheimer whose name I mispronounced at the beginning of this podcast sorry mr kersheimer um it's called hate junk mail follow these steps and mr kersheimer has gone to the trouble of basically giving every name address telephone number and website you would need to completely rid your life of junk mail so it's definitely worth reading and if you want to read our take on it you can type can I stop getting junk mail in the search bar at howstuffworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com brought to you by the reinvented 2012 camry it's ready are you the war on drugs is the excuse our

government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff stuff that'll piss you off the cops are they just like looting are they just like pillaging they just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed they call civil asset work be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast bridgewater the hit fiction podcast is back a supernatural thriller presented in immersive 3d binaural audio the bridgewater triangle there is some kind of mystical force in this region that attracts monsters and paranormal activity there's something beyond our understanding going on here starring supernaturals misha collins the walking deads melissa ponzi and rogue ones

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