LETTER: Advertiser gone wild
By Mona Mattei
To the Editor:
Recycling is a way of life in this day and age, and I’m pleased to say that I make every effort to support the movement. For example, take the paper and flyers that is delivered to my door every week. I faithfully pick it up and walk it over to my recycling bin. Clean, and ecologically appropriate. Yes folks, that’s all I do with the weekly delivery from a local company – recycle. Well, not always, sometimes I burn it as fire starter in the winter.
As I analyzed this process recently, I realized that I no longer wish to participate in this recycling process, at least not for this particular product. I don’t ask for it to be delivered, and I certainly find no use for it. Worse yet, I am quite certain that our annual garbage / recycling bill in the City of Grand Forks is partly based on the weight or volume of recycling that passes through our services. With that realization, and the fact that the current delivery person is adamant to leave the product at a door we don’t use, uncovered in any weather, I decided to cancel the unwanted delivery.
So I called up our local company and asked for the delivery to stop, just in advance of a vacation so I would not need to worry about soggy papers on my doorstep. Alas, I returned from vacation to find a few wet specimens gracing my doorstep – a bright red flag to any and all thieves that we were away.
I appreciate the courtesy that the customer service representative I called treated me with, and this is no slight to her. I once again requested that this service be stopped and was again advised that it truly would be eliminated.
You guessed it, these deliveries continue.
To top it off our delivery person is apparently a ghost or delivers in the wee hours of the night because in all the past eight months I have never once seen hide nor hair of them.
Annoying, yes, but I take you back to my opening lines. I am committed to recycling. I do, however, have to draw a line at spending my tax dollars recycling for a local corporation from which I do not request a product.
I cannot continue to be apathetic as it has become apparent that there is just no way to opt out so I am speaking out now. Do you have a similar problem? Why am we forced to do some corporation’s recycling? And how is it that they can in good conscious promote to their advertising customers that this product is something every resident wants and reads? When did we lose the right to choose our products?
Perhaps in the near future I will not need to clean up my doorstep every Thursday. Please keep your product and put it into your own recycling bin not the taxpayers’.
