People have been complaining about junk mail for a long time. A sample of public opinion over the past 120 years:
Any person who ever wrote a letter to a lottery, or other advertised scheme, is liable to have a large circle of correspondents. The name once obtained must go the round of the fraternity, and, when thus used, is either kept for a new scheme by the same fraud or else sold to another one of the brotherhood. – Anthony Comstock, 1880
I am made the target of scores of paper bullets which are shot at me every morning. Here, for instance, is a good woman who has imported a lot of baby clothes, and stops me to tell me of it, or another boasts of her woman’s underwear…another person brings a school to my attention; a second his meats and groceries…another his pickles and other things in which I have no more interest than I have in the man in the moon. – Businessman in letter to the Commercial Advertiser, 1898
It probably does not occur to [the average man] that by buying something by mail he has made his name a commodity in itself and becomes a target for commercial correspondents as long as he lives and probably long after a tombstone has been erected to him on some grassy hillside. – Kansas City Star, 1913
[Mail circulars] cost $20 a thousand to mail, and $20,000 worth more time to prepare than you have time to waste. When you compile them you think fondly of their merit and wholly fail to remember that you tossed aside nine in ten of those received yesterday without so much as looking at them. – Furniture Trade Review and Interior Decorator, 1917
Wherever all these people get my name is a mystery, but none of them ever misses me. – Businessman quoted by The New York Times, 1920 The old joke about the postman’s bringing only bills has passed out of date. Along with what used to be his chief stock in trade, he leaves every morning now a deluge of letters describing ingenious opportunities for spending our money. It is not actually a conspiracy on the part of the waste basket industry. Rather, it is the little trickle of `direct mail advertising’ that was let loose in the business world not long ago, risen overnight to drench us all in a sea of wisecracks, platitudes and exclamation points. – The New York Times, 1928
How did you land on a list? Hold your hat. Your name has become a commodity in a mushrooming multimillion-dollar empire known as the `mailing list business,’ which…pigeonholes Americans into thousands of special financial categories, geared to making the cash registers of the nation jingle like crazy. – New York Daily News, 1954
There is no escaping the bombardment of mail from merchandisers and other interested parties who have bought your name. Once you are on a list, the mail comes on forever. – Vance Packard, “The Naked Society,” 1964
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