A different postman was trying to deposit another ream of junk mail into our hallway today. While inadvertently intentionally cutting off his access to our letterbox I chatted with him for a while. According to him, the Royal Mail or the Post Office (he wasn't sure which) gets 5 pence per item of junk mail delivered. That's not a bad crack, but the poor old postie gets none of it, he just gets a hernia and hassle from those members of the public who don't want their houses filled waist-high with unwanted tosh.
And the Sorting Office folk are now playing dirty, they are intentionally placing the bona fide mail between (and sometimes even within) items of junk mail, so that unwitting folk who just dump/bin/burn/shred (or, as we do, re-post in a variety of post-boxes) their share of junk risk losing the desirable mail for which they have waited so long.
I offered him a deal. For each item of junk mail destined for our house I would give him, not the Royal Mail or the Post Office, the going-rate of five pence to either deliver it elsewhere or otherwise dispose of it.
He says he's going to think about it.
The flip-side of the deal is that if the junk mail doesn't stop soon I will be raising Mary-Hell at the Sorting Office because we have been registered with the Door-to-Door Opt-Out Scheme and with the MPS scheme for so long that I had hair when I first registered.
The posties do know about those registrations, of course. Mainly because during the most-recent festive season our front door was decorated not with boughs of holly but with this polite reminder:
THE SMALL(ish) PRINT... (updated 23/07/2016)
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Free Speech: you may well have the right to it, but you've no right to compel me to a) listen to it, or b) publish it!
I do that regularly. Save it up, put it in an A4 envelope that has been re-cycled and then send it back, return to sender.
For the last twenty years or so, I have been sending stuff from, say, Anglian Windows, in the reply paid envelope to MBNA, and the MBNA stuff in the Anglian Windows reply paid envelope.
That way, the Post Office makes money and the bastard Junk Mail companies get a load of someone else's junk mail. It has made me ever so happy.
🙂
I could be talking tosh but don't you have to re-opt-out of Royal Mail delivered junk mail every couple of years? The opt-out at our old house seemed to work for the whole six years we were there, but I vaguely recall that when we moved I read something about the need to repeatedly confirm over the years that you still don't want that junk.
Hi Gayle.
Nah, you talk sense, not tosh. Re-registration is required every two years, which is why I make a point of re-registering every year.
https://stopjunkmail.org.uk/guide/door-to-door-opt-out
https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/293
I often wonder how it would work out if we had no letterbox. Are letterboxes mandatory? If we didn't have one, would the postie leave our mail, and the associated junk, with a neighbour? Or, if the postie took the mail back to the sorting office for me to collect, would I also be expected to collect the junk?