If you feel like me you are not alone. Over the years, except for an occasional bill that I get in the snail mail, almost everything else is junk. So why is it that the less junk mail we read, the more we get. Well, it is complicated why that happens. First of all, some idiots still read their junk mail and actually buy stuff based on it. Two, the more USPS struggles financially, the more it lowers the rate for shipping junk mail, so marketers can flood our mailboxes at increasingly lower rates (junk mail accounted for 56% of all postal deliveries in 2011, compared with 45% ten years ago). That means that they can still turn a profit on direct mail and not spend that money on online advertising. And finally, as technology has improved, direct marketers now have highly detailed profiles on you because they have married the data they have collected online on you and the ones available from traditional resources like county records, neighborhood statistics, and surveys completed by you, so that when they do mail you something, chances are that if you are buried in debt, you will get mail for debt settlement and payday loans rather than exotic vacations.
My Life In Bits And Pieces in Massachusetts.