don't go postal

this time of year, mailboxes are flooded with catalogs and ads and coupons as retailers remind us that it's the season to buy buy buy. Ugh! Sure, I like perusing catalogs and saving coupons for stores I frequent, but it's getting ridiculous. Today I found three sets of coupons for Express: one addressed to my maiden name, one to my married name, and one to my husband's name. Can they not figure out that they only need to send one per address?? It is a waste of paper and leads to annoying clutter.



I found a few resources that are supposed to remove your name from the mailing lists. First was optoutprescreen.com which is specifically for credit cards - by far the worst offenders! Every week we get offers from 4+ airlines for their special mileage credit cards. Supposedly registering on this site will instruct the credit bureaus that you do not want pre-approved offers by mail. The next was catalogchoice.org - this one lets you put in company names and will remove your name from their catalog mailings.

Both of these take 6-8 weeks or so before going into effect. I tried to use multiple combinations of names that show up on junk mail to cut out as much as possible. I hope this works! It would be great to improve the signal to noise ratio, reducing the junk so that getting the mail is a fun experience again. The benefit to the environment is a huge plus too of course!

what do you do to cut down on clutter at home?