Toning down the rhetoric — I just recycled unread and, as much as possible, un-even-looked-at almost all of my Sunday newspaper. Habitually, I throw out unopened almost all the “snail-mail” I receive, and, unexamined, all the catalogs and coupons. I use various cybernetic devices to remove the ads from what I read on my computer, and I mute the commercials on TV and zap them when I can record TV shows.
And if I don’t get a human being on the line immediately when I answer the phone, I hang up: I’m not listening to robots anymore, or even live humans calling from phone banks. (“Dead air” on the line when you answer the phone is a dead giveaway you’re being called from a phone bank, probably a commercial one.)
I’m a guy, and I don’t like shopping, and I’m a guy who grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and just absorbed a modernist dislike of clutter. So I want shopping to be simple, and I won’t keep a drawer full of coupons or stacks of newspaper ads.
Also, I don’t want to have to work for free and do complex math in my head, figuring out whether it’s cheaper to use a coupon to buy a pint of “New! Improved! Valohex,” as opposed to the “Manager’s sale price” for the comparable “Valodern,” sold by weight.
And I’m unsubscribing from the electronic mailing list of any firm online that sends more than one or two pitches a week to my e-mail account.
I regret screwing over people desperate to get eyeballs on their ads and firms trying to move their products, and I’m convinced that Thomas Jefferson was right about serious journalism being necessary to maintain a republic.
Still, I’ve had it with the ads and commercials and the constant invasion of my psychological space — plus my physical USPS mailbox and my e-mail “in” box.
Spam is not a victimless crime: we miss important messages amid all the clutter.
And then there’s fraud: a fair number of those spams are scams, and I’d rather miss 20 or 30 good deals rather than devote (again) several days changing passwords and ramping up security on my credit because I followed just one malicious Internet link.
About 1970, a group of business-school graduate students at the University of Illinois investigated what would be the best way to shop in Champaign-Urbana. The answer? If you enjoy shopping, shop around: it’d be cheap entertainment for you, and you might actually save a dollar or two. If you don’t enjoy shopping, do not shop around: find a fairly cheap, generally reliable store, preferably one that did not give coupons, and shop there: quickly, in and out. Between what even a grad student’s time is worth and gas money — even at 32 cents a gallon — it was better to just make a list, buy what you need from stores you trust, and move on.
It’s more difficult nowadays to follow such advice, but I’m going to try.
The advertisers are out there, battling for our eyeballs and ears and attention; it’s time to fight back.
Richard D. Erlich is professor emeritus at Miami University in Oxford, and currently lives in Ventura County, Calif.