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PatchWork
by Joyce Whitis |
Catalogs
They start arriving sometime in the late summer, those thin, slick, bright colored items. In the beginning there is just one that shows up in your mailbox, sort of shuffled in with the rest of the letters from credit card companies and circulars from grocery store chains. And then as the weather cools down and walks down to the mailbox are more brisk than before, they begin to multiply. You are hard pressed to gather them all up and wag them back up the hard graveled lane to your house. Once there you throw all the mail on the dinning table where it sort of explodes into a pile of catalogs all intent on selling you something that you never in this world thought you wanted!
How did this stuffing of mailboxes take place? Don't you remember? Are you stupid or something? Away last year, or maybe it was the year before that, you wanted more than anything in the world to own a pair of seat covers for your pickup that looked like skins from Holstein cows! Not only did you want seat covers that looked like cowhide, you wanted matching floor mats, remember that, girl?
Yeah....yeah I remember that. I also seem to remember that a friend, knowing my utmost need, found such items in a slick little catalog and passed the book on to me. I ordered the whole shootin' match and just a few weeks the package came back all charged to my Visa. Well I was just as proud as could be with my new Holstein seat covers and matching floor mats in my F150 XLT so I just drove off down the road.
This is the hard part.
In a few weeks the catalogs started to arrive in the big mailbox that I share with my husband, Tom. Just a slow trickle in the beginning, the dreaded catalogs mounted an assault on our box to the point that our carrier threatened to throw them in the dirt in protest.
What I want to know is how in the world do these publishers find out the addresses of folks that they want to harass. My niece who does a lot of stuff with glass beads and a hot glue gun and sets up a table at craft shows all over, gave me a run down on the catalogs she has received in the past ten years.
For your enjoyment and education her record keeping is hereby reproduced.
(This all began because she wrote an order for a bead kit.)
In 1986 she received 291 catalogs in the mail.
1987............................422
1988.............................387
1989..............................526
1990..............................530
1991..............................610
1992..............................655
1993...............................746
1994...............................633
1995................................475
1996.................................433
As you can see the peak was in 1993 and now the catalogs seem to be leveling off. This is absolutely amazing when you consider the fact that she has ordered out of only a couple of these publications and nothing in the past few years.
Today I got the fourth catalog so far this month. They offer me anything from see-through pajamas to pictures of the Virgin Mary painted on velvet. The last publication included a warning note that this would be my last catalog unless I placed an order! Well that's certainly good news! I know the mail carrier will be proud.
Who asked for all the unwanted mail we get every day? Why is it that somebody out there keeps sending slick pages of printed material we never wanted and will never read? How do we put a stop to all this garbage that clutters up our mail service? "Return to Sender" stamped across the item? Suggestions?