Comment by edwhitesell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edwhitesell | Hacker News Reader

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I'd rather see much larger bulk rates via the USPS for something like "environmental impact".

For example, I'm currently getting no less than 3 letters per week from Spectrum (formerly TWC) promoting their new triple-play plans. I drop all of them in the recycling bin.

I couldn't care less about their bottom line, but I do care about the environmental impact.

At 3x per week, it probably costs them around USD$0.80/week (postage, paper, printing, etc.) to send those 3 letters. Call it USD$1 to make the math easier. I currently pay about $9.03/week. If I upgraded, it would be at least 3x that amount.

I'm not sure how to calculate the profit they would gain after an upgrade, but I can't imagine it would take more than 2-3 months for the new rates to more than cover the mailing fees for an entire year of their letters.

And yet, I'll never upgrade and I hate the waste caused by their practices.

Why does this happen? Is there some subcontractor who just bills by the piece so they don't care about de-duping the idiotic mailmerge that has 5 entries for each entity I'm affiliated with?

In the case I listed above, these are separate, distinct letters. Certainly from an automated process, but clearly all part of a larger marketing program.

In the ones like Dell (which I've also experienced in the past), I suspect there's some metric involved for getting the most contacts for "coverage". The reality is unless they were tracking my moves to different companies, there could be different people with the same name. In that sense, I'm very glad they can't correlate with employment data.

There's also the idea that sending to multiple people within a company means someone may see something they want and try to go through the procurement process because of the catalog, rather than because "IT" says it's time for a refresh.

Not that I agree with any of those practices, for a number of reasons, but I could understand the case for them.

Cable and phone companies don't seem to care about efficiency in their marketing efforts. Almost everywhere they're allowed to count it as an expense and fold it into their regulated costs and make a regulated profit off it.

Putting on my cynic hat, buying lots of newspaper, television and radio ads is a good way to keep the media on the sidelines instead of criticizing the incumbents.

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