It’s time to check in with my very first baby steps challenge: stop those catalogs and junk mail once and for all.
This photo represents all the junk mail we received during the past month, a year after I originally took on the challenge. It’s significantly less than we used to get, but I still want to get it down to almost none.
Last month I republished this post from last year about the challenge and the steps I would take to remedy the problem. Last year, when I first tackled the issue, I did most of the tasks on my list that are recommended to eliminate junk mail: signed up for Catalog Choice, put my name on Forest Ethic’s Do Not Mail list, and went to optoutprescreen.com to opt out of all credit card offers. The step I DID NOT take was to call companies individually and ask them to remove me from their mailing list.
The steps I took drastically cut the amount of junk mail we receive. In particular, we get almost no random junk mail or credit card offers anymore. But some of these catalog companies are persistent so what I’m going to do now is go back to Catalog Choice and make sure I have listed all the companies in this photo and then start making a call every time I get a catalog. Many of these catalogs are from companies I used to order from in my pre-Compact days, so I suppose they’re not giving up on me without a fight. But it’s going to be a long time, or maybe never, until I’ll be spending my precious free time looking through catalogs and buying full-price items again.
Have you reduced your junk mail? How did you do it? Please leave your best tips in the Comments section. Also let us know if you’ve taken up this challenge and whether or not you’ve been successful.
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