Month: March 2014

More unwanted junk mail

Every day I when come home from work, there is usually some junk mail waiting for me in my porch.

Virgin Media are installing fibre optic cabling for their broadband service in my area.  As expected, they want to let everybody know about it.  This has led to a never-ending supply of their junk mail landing on my door mat.

At first I would chuck their letters in with my pile of other papers, leaflets and junk mail and bin them.  But after a while I saw it as a form of bullying, as well as an annoying invasion of my privacy.

I contacted Virgin’s Social Media team (socialteam@virginmedia.co.uk) and they said they would stop all marketing going to my address.  But it still continues to this very day.

After a good dig on the internet, various ways can be found of stopping some junk mail being delivered to your address.  First amongst these is the ‘Mailing Preference Service’.  They will stop most items directly addressed to you.  But those annoying ‘To the Occupier’ letters give it the slip.  This because the latter is a loophole, as it is classed as unaddressed mail.

The opposite effect comes with Royal Mail’s ‘Door-to-Door Opt Out’ scheme.  This stops items without a postal address.  But it has a legal duty to deliver all mail with a ‘delivery point’, meaning to the address, rather than the addressee – which it sees as irrelevant.  Therefore it considers ‘To the Occupier’ as addressed mail.  So you can’t win!

The big problem seems to be direct marketers are self-regulating.  They take the attitude that their industry keeps a lot of paper, printing and distribution workers in employment.  They claim their industry contributes around £20M to the UK economy.  Royal Mail gets half of its business from this source too.  So they aren’t going to be very helpful in killing the goose which lays the golden egg.

On the other side of the coin, how much does it cost to dispose of the average household’s 455 items of junk mail a year? And how does it affect recycling targets this country is obliged to meet?  It seems very irresponsible to waste so much paper on something most people clearly don’t want.  It also begs the question, what kind of service can you expect from a company which refuses to comply with the simple request to stop delivering their junk mail to your home?

What Virgin doesn’t seem to realise is their junk mail is actually not serving the purpose it was set up for.  Instead, it’s having the opposite effect.  Many disgruntled people like me are so fed up with them, we wouldn’t subscribe to their service even if it was free.  They can carry on being a virgin – they certainly won’t be touched by the hand of this man.