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Every day in the mail comes oodles of consumer catalogs: printed on quality stock paper, glossy, and many almost as thick as the community phone book.
Often, right in the mailroom, there is a huge recycle bin and there just about everybody drops the catalogues from their mailbox straight into the ātrash.ā
Who needs these expensive and wasteful printed catalogues that typically go from mailbox to recycle bin or garbage can without anyone even breaking the binding on them? With the Internet, the same informationāand moreāis available online. Moreover, online, you can comparison shop between stores for the best prices, shipping, and return policies, and you can typically get product and vendor ratings too to make sure that you are not buying a dud from a dud!
Despite this, according to the Wall Street Journal, 16 October 2009, āmore than 17 billion catalogs were mailed in the U.S. last year–about 56 for every American.ā
Read againā56 for every American! This is obscene.
Here are some basic statistics on the wastefulness of these catalogs:
āCatalogs account for 3% of the roughly 80 million tons of paper products.ā
āMaking paper accounted for 2.4% of U.S. energy use in 2006.ā
āThe paper typically used in catalogs contains about 10% recycled contentā¦far less than paper in general, which typically contains about 30%…[and] for newspapers, the amount of recycled content is roughly 40%.ā
āThe average U.S catalog retailer reported mailing about 21 million catalogs in 2007.ā
āThe National Directory of Catalogsā¦lists 12,524 catalogs.ā
YETā¦
āOnly 1.3% of those catalogs generated a sale.ā
So why do printed paper catalogs persist?
Apparently, ābecause glossy catalog pages still entice buyers in a way that computer images donāt.ā Moreover, marketers say that catalogs at an average cost of slightly over a $1.20 each ādrive sales at web sites.ā
And of course, the U.S. Postal Service ādepends on catalogs as an important source of revenue.ā
However, in the digital era, it is time for us to see these paper catalogs get converted en-mass into e-catalogs. Perhaps, a paper copy can still be made available to consumers upon request, so those who really want them and will use them, can still get them, but on a significantly more limited basis.
Sure, catalogs are nice to leaf through, especially around the holiday time. But overall, they are a profligate waste of money and a drain on our natural resources. They fill our mailboxes with mostly ājunkā and typically are completely unsolicited. With the advent of the Internet, paper catalogs are āovercome by eventsā (OBE), now that we have vast information rich, e-commerce resources available online, all the time.
Normally, I believe in taking a balanced approach to issues, and moderating strong opinions. However, in this case, we are talking about pure waste and harm to our planet, just because we donāt have the capacity to change.
We need to stop persisting in the old ways of doing business when they are no longer useful. This is just one example of those, and business that donāt transition to digital modernity in a timely fashion risk becoming obsolete along with their catalogs that go from the mailbox right into the trash.