Hello, and Happy 2024! It’s been a while since I posted – with the holidays, travel and other projects, I haven’t been focused on writing posts for The Memory Cache lately. But I’m still here, still reading books and watching shows, and hoping to share more reviews about the best of these soon.
In the meantime, today I’m doing something a little different. I’m posting a review of a simple but inspirational smartphone app I discovered recently, while browsing an article online about how to reduce the constant flow of paper junk mail that arrives in our mailboxes each day.
For a long time, I’ve wondered how I could simply tell the vast majority of commercial and charitable organizations that mail me their paper ad materials through the U.S. Mail to please stop! and make that stick. But it always seemed like a hydra-headed monster, since most of these organizations don’t provide any easy method of getting off their lists, and also end up quickly reselling their mailing lists to other companies too.
I couldn’t imagine how I could ever get ahead of this problem. It’s a headache for many of us, as we waste minutes every day sorting through the pile of paper we brought in from the mailbox, and then immediately throw most of it in the trash or recycle can, which we then have to carry back out to the sidewalk for pickup. Over many years, that daily time and effort really adds up, not to mention the constant aggravation of how pointless it all is.
This pernicious and still-large portion of the advertising industry relies on obsolete technology developed in the 1980s to try to grab our attention and dollars. It devours untold trees and forests every year to make the paper for the fancy glossy brochures that go immediately into the trash, and it pours toxic chemicals into the environment as part of the paper-making process.
And what about the fuel burned by the US Postal Service, delivering all this trash we don’t want, and by our trash and recycle trucks when they haul it away?
I have tried the “do not mail” registries. They may slow the flow a little bit, but they’re not a real solution, since many companies appear to ignore them, or don’t check to see if you’re on them before putting you on their mailing lists. And every time you buy a new product or service, or make a new contribution, a new wave of paper junk mail inevitably will follow.
PaperKarma provides a different, more active approach. It’s a simple phone app you can download and install from the Apple Store or Google Play, like any of the hundreds of other apps you already have on your phone. You then create a free account to begin, although it is a paid service, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Once installed, all you do is take a picture in the app of the logo on each piece of junk mail you receive, and see if PaperKarma recognizes it. In many cases, it does right away. In other cases, you may have to choose from a list it offers (its best guesses), or if that too fails, start typing in a search for the mailer’s name. After several weeks of daily use, it hasn’t yet failed to identify the sender for me through one of these three methods.
Once you’ve identified the sender, you click the “Unsubscribe”
button. PaperKarma sends a message through its proprietary interface to the
advertiser, making your unsubscribe request for you. In many cases, you’ll get
an immediate “success” message, indicating they completed the request to the
sender to get you off the mailing list.
In other cases, the request may be “pending” for some period, but almost
all of the requests will eventually resolve to “success”. PaperKarma also maintains a log or list for you of each of your requests and the ultimate status of it.
PaperKarma claims about a 90% success rate in processing these requests for you. What could be simpler? And it’s even fun, and very satisfying – it’s like hearing a “zap!” or shouting “got you!” every time you hit the “Unsubscribe” button, and know some other entity you never want to hear from again will be forced to stop bothering you.
The subscription model is interesting. You can choose a $3.99 monthly fee (which can be set up as recurring), but if you’re going to use it for a while, they offer six-month and annual terms as well that are more expensive, but progressively cheaper per month. Then they have a “lifetime” subscription for $59.99.
I began with the monthly subscription, just to try it, but after two weeks, it became clear to me that this is a great app not only for you or me, but also for our society. If its use went viral across our population, it could potentially dismantle the paper-based advertising industry in a short period of time, or at least make it a shadow of its former self. On that basis, both to always have this valuable tool at the best price (for my own benefit), and more importantly to support the company behind this app right now, I have converted my monthly subscription to a lifetime one.
I have had some interesting reflections on this app, and the possible foreseeable consequences of its success. With 330 million of us in this country alone, if Paper Karma’s user base went from hundreds of thousands to many millions (i.e. if we can help the app go viral through word of mouth), it could perhaps achieve what it hopes to do – help protect the environment from the industry’s paper-based junk mail activities, while ridding us of this antiquated and pointless annoyance in our daily lives.
If that happened, though, there would be social and financial costs. PaperKarma’s own business model is brilliant for short-term gains, as millions may sign up for subscriptions for a product and service that are probably not that labor intensive or expensive to support.
But if they’re completely successful, in the longer run their users will eliminate the problem which their app solves, and with it the need for people to keep paying for subscriptions. I would imagine this is a long-term risk and a problem that the company is well aware of, and willing to accept, given the potential near term benefits to their company and the environment.
Other potential costs would be to the employment of many of the people currently involved in the entire life-cycle of all this paper trash: from the lumber industry workers who cut down and process the trees, to the paper manufacturing plant workers, the ad agencies, the graphic artists and designers, the printing company staff, the postal service sorting and delivery people, and the trash hauling and recycling workers. If most of this trash goes away, so will many of their jobs.
I’m sympathetic to that, but to me the answer is to find more socially valuable and productive activities for those people than continuing to do what they’re doing. Most of us would probably agree that paper-based advertising mail is a wasteful, ecologically unsupportable industry that few people like or want in their lives. I sympathize with all the people who work as telemarketers too, as a way of surviving, but I don’t want them to keep doing those jobs either.
This is essentially the same kind of situation as with telemarketing, of a largely unnecessary and irritating major business sector with an even more environmentally compelling justification for its demise, which if it occurred would require that its work force find other employment.
A negative impact on employment is not avoidable if everyone is able to opt out of junk mail easily. It is important at least to acknowledge that job loss would be a likely consequence of an app as potentially powerful as PaperKarma could be (if its use became widespread) in eliminating one of the main ways businesses and charitable groups currently try to compete for our attention.
By the way, for anyone who is curious: this review is not paid for, and I derive no financial benefit from it. I think this app is an unusually creative and powerful little solution to a frustrating individual problem many of us have put up with for most of our lives, with potential important social and environmental benefits from its widespread use as well. That's why I'm writing this -- I love the concept of the app, and the implementation seems excellent too.
The app is called PaperKarma. It’s fun, it’s easy to
use, and you’ll be helping to rid the planet of the plague of junk mail, while drastically
reducing the flow of any advertising mail you don’t want into your own mailbox.
It’s for both Apple and Android smartphones. Check it out, and if you like it, pass the word on to others. Highly recommended.