Confederacy of a Dunce - Letterbox Spam 3 (in 3d)

Thursday, April 20, 2006

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Regular readers will no doubt be dismayed to discover that, of all the various recurring themes (that) I've suggested (that) will appear here, I've decided to revisit the junk that's appeared through our mail slot (previous entry HERE if you are masochistic). It's been two weeks since that entry, and a mountain of junk has made its way into our entryway (thanks to the good weather and the holiday period, no doubt).

Clearly springtime has brought with it a boom in home improvement services which again were the most common (12 pieces). The highlight in this category was a fairly high-quality corrugated cardboard "SOLD" sign (about A5 size, 6.5" x 8") by an estate agency clearly desperate to grab business away from Winkworth. This category also yielded our first expenditure as a direct result of letterbox spamming, to which I'll return later. The next most popular category was taxi services (6 pieces), although there was massive duplication in this category: three cards each from two different car services (one card for each member of the household including the cat). Restaurants were surprisingly low (6 pieces), and mostly from establishments that have already donated excess paper to us in the past month. Only a couple of election-related items made it through (one Labour, one Conservative) despite the approaching local elections. I guess it's true: they don't want us to vote. One more dodgy clothing collection company, "Island of Hope Ltd", although the fact that they are a commercial enterprise rather than a charity is mentioned much more prominently than the previously-mentioned "Silverwall Ltd.". They also include reference to a website (HERE) which does not entirely allay my suspicions. We also got five miscellaneous ads from shops that I don't have the energy to describe any further.

I think my favorite this time around is the two self-improvement ads from "Professor" Uossof who claims to be "one of the best International Marabouts in Spiritual Healer and Advisor", helping you "solve all your problems regarding Black Magic, Sexual, Exam, Love, Voodoo, Transactions in Business and Self Spirits, Unwanted Union or to bring Lover back from Dark to Bright way". He did at least have the (no doubt psychic) insight to leave us two ads, one for me and one for the lady of the house.

We did make one purchase in this period based on letterbox spam, but this is an unusual circumstance. Our local authority is part of the government's recycling initiative called WRAP (it's unclear what the acronym represents), and is encouraging home composting by offering cut-price home composting bins (details of the program HERE, but we learned about it from the flyer through our postbox). We were one of "nearly 200" households in our area who jumped on the offer of a large compost bin at the knockdown price of £6. So now we will be collecting foul household waste in the back garden for a few weeks before we grow tired of the process and ask the Landlord to take it away and get rid of the smell.

Score for the past two weeks:
14 days, 34 pieces of advertising (2.4/day)

Score so far:
35 days, 64 pieces of advertising (1.8/day)
Total amount spent by the Dunces based on letterbox advertising: £6 (17 pence/day)

consume

Thursday, April 20, 2006 2:25:02 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)