New Scheme

For years I’ve been getting credit card offers in the mail. You get ‘em too? I usually mail the offers back to the companies making the offer. I open the envelope and stuff all the promotional stuff into the enclosed postage-paid envelope and send it back to the sender. I give them the pleasure of throwing the junk away AND paying for the postage. You know, they only pay the postage when you actually mail it back to them. Everybody should do this. I look at it as a backdoor civil disobedience. The US Post Office, through the postage you pay every time you mail something, already subsidizes the mailing of the junk to you in the first place. Tell your friends! Maybe if enough people do this they’ll stop (wishful thinking).

Here’s the new scheme.

Credit cards I have accounts with keep sending me these convenient little checks. Usually three or four at a time. They’re meant to be used to transfer balances from one card to another. I look at them as just that much more junk floating through the postal system. More junk that forces the Postal Service to raise the rate of a first class postage stamp every nine or ten months. They’re getting as bad as the oil companies.

I have a friend, he’s a moron, who got several of these checks and went out and bought a bunch of mildly expensive toys with them. When the charges appeared, as if by magic, on his next credit card bill, he was way shocked. What a moron! By all means, don’t be another moron. We have enough of them already (no political jokes here, thank you).

Here’s what I do with their little checks. I use them. I cash one in the cafeteria at my office to buy a soda from the machine. I use one to buy a cup of coffee in the morning as I drive to work. Never for more than $1.50. There are no extra service charges. No minimums that I’ve seen. I’ve even read the fine print. I figure it costs the credit card company at least $2.00 to print, mail, and process the check. I’d mail them back to the credit card companies but they don’t send postage-paid envelopes with them. Tell all your credit card holding friends. Stop the insanity.

I wonder when Al Gore will start in on the environmental cost of the raw tonnage of pure waste traversing our postal system. Not to mention all the oxygen-producing trees cut down to produce the paper in a somewhat less than environmentally sensitive chemical process.

Think about it!