Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Stop The Phone Book!!

I have lived at my address for less than 4 years.  But oddly enough I have received about 12 new phonebooks in that time.  Today, I received 3!  Do you believe it?? THREE!    I have not used a phone book in years!!! 

I received a lovely two inch book from Yellow Book serving Westminster/Carroll County for 2008-2009. 

Ooh.. lookie here, I have a totally bodacious 2.5 incher  serving Greater Baltimore from Verizon!!!

Oh..  and I can't say enough about the honking THREE inch book serving the entire 410/443 area code from... ooh...  Verizon again! 

I can't take it anymore!! This is the single most ridiculous thing in my opinion...  I wonder if I can find Greater Baltimore numbers in my 410/443 book?  What do you think?  I also can't help but wonder if Westminster is in the Greater Baltimore area..

Hold on.. I'm checking...

Nope...  it ends at the reservoir. 

So, I have decided that I need to figure out how to stop the phone books from coming.  First place to look is, on the book itself... no number, no email... but there is a website on verizon books www.directorystore.com let's go there real quick.  Hm.... I'm not seeing the "take me off the mailing list" link. 

So, I googled the phrase "how to stop phone books" and it got 70,700,000 hits in .26 seconds.  Gee, if I was marketing a product and got hits like that, then I'd be a millionaire.  So, I'm cruising the hits... most are blogs..

I did find this:  http://www.paperlesspetition.org/  so, I signed the petition   Click keys, save trees. .

I also came across some phone numbers to try to call:
Yellow Book: 1-800-929-3556 or 1-888-400-5914
Verizon: 1-800-555-4833...  

Another blogger suggested to call this number :Call 1-(877)-243-8339... I'm not sure who this is, but hey... it might be worth it.

Well, at least I can donate these books to the arts center, we use the paper in my pottery class :")

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I took the easy way out on this one and just signed up with MyJunkTree and let them do all the legwork. All I had to do was hit a few buttons and I recived a follow-up email in a few days letting me know my address was off teh list. I'll have to see what happens the next go around. I must admit I did not sign up for the service just to stop the phone books, I signed up to Stop Junk Mail and the phone books were an added bonus. I hated all teh credit card offers and there seemed to be no end to the catalogs so I signed up and got most of this stuff to stop. Quick and easy.

Anonymous said...

I happen to be one of the owners of MyJunkTree and as a new company I search the web to see if we are getting any visibility out there and it seems the word is getting out. Thanks for the support.

We launched the company because we were tired of all the junk mail we were receiving and we personally did not want to bounce all over the web to contact all the different companies to stop it all. First and foremost we wanted to let people choose what they wanted to let come to their home knowing that some people really do like some of the coupons and catalogs. So our clients choose what they want stopped.

We also had to provide a service that is different than the other services out there, so here is what we offer:

1. We have a database of over 1300 catalogs that you can choose to stop.
2. We have over a 2000 charities/Non-Profits that you can stop solicitations from.
3. Stop the delivery of the national phone directories.
4. Stop the delivery of the weekly coupons.
5. Stop the general credit card offers as well as the ones from your own major bank.
6. Stop the miscellaneous junk mail from the data brokers.
7. You can register on the National Do Not Call Registry from the website.
8. You can order your no strings attached free annual credit report right from the website.
9. We plant trees with every new membership.

And, yes we are a paid service and yes you can do everything that we do for free, if you want to do all the research and spend the time contacting the companies yourself it can easily be done. We have just done all of the legwork for our clients and feel there is value in the service we provide.

Unknown said...

You may want to opt out from receiving telephone books at www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org. They will contact all the telephone book publishers (for free) and register your name to opt out.