Junk mail is the plague of the 21st Century. We get it in our email boxes and also at home, in our snail mail boxes, too. Pizza coupons, dentists advertising lower-cost braces, funerals, magazines, mobile phones, whatever it is, the marketing powers that be seem to think it’s a great idea to bombard us with enough paper and garbage, in hopes that we’ll fall for it and order something. If you are sick and tired of being covered in endless piles of marketing garbage, then read on.
The Direct Marketing Association is an old organization that came recommended to me by the Florida Department of Agriculture Consumer newsletter a few weeks ago. According to their site at http://www.dmachoice.org/consumerassistance.html , they can assist in helping consumers in getting off of email, snail mail and marketers’ call lists. They also give advice on protecting your identity and tell you what to do if you feel that your identity has been stolen or compromised in any way. After signing up, my junk mail volume seems to have dropped so it must be working.
To be put on the national Do Not Call List, contact the Federal Trade Commission’s registry at www.donotcall.gov or reach them by telephone at 1-888-382-1222 to ask for inclusion. Also, if you get calls from telemarketers, tell them to put you on their "Do Not Call List" and by law, they must abide by your wishes. There are always calls that seem to slip through the cracks, so to speak, but at least being put on this list should curb nuisance calls to some degree. Be very wary who you call on your home phone, as many telemarketing companies have caller ID, and if you call them then they may try to harass you with marketing calls in the future. Throw away questionable mail telling you to call and claim a prize for a contest you haven’t won. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
If you feel as if you’ve been ripped off or taken advantage of, make sure to take action and report it to the Better Business Bureau and any other authorities that you think should know about the situation. If you want to report what happened to other consumers, try the Ripoff Report, online. It’s free to tell your story and you can stay anonymous if you want to. Make sure to stick to the facts of the case and nothing more. If consumers work on reporting the bad guys, eventually their businesses may suffer from it. Don’t put up with shabby or dishonest treatment. Life is too short to waste time on companies that don’t deserve our business.