Catalog choice

Catalog choice - The best tool out there to stop the spam from coming to the mailbox (not the email but the land mail).

Our mailbox used to get so much junk and unwanted mails that once when we were out of town for a week, the mail lady stopped delivering the mails to our mail box and started with holding all our mails and parcels at the post office. I even lost the note that said our mails are being withheld and began to think that some how my mail is getting stolen. Then a short trip to the post office and the good lady delivered me a big basket full of mail and said “your mail box was overflowing and hence I stopped delivering”. After weeding through all the junk mail, I finally ended up with the 10% of the actual mail that I was interested in.    

At around this time a good friend of mine introduced me to Catalog choice, as the website says – it works on reducing junk mails to your mailbox. The registration process is pretty straight forward and in my experience it really works. For ex: I used to get a bundle of junk mails from company called Red-Plum (they bundle every possible thing from CVS to HEB to Walmart to Papa Johns and so on) and it is always addressed to resident and once I added this to catalog choice, I have stopped receiving mails from them. Now, I don’t have to check my mail every few days and can go up to a week easily without my mailbox overflowing.

Give it a try, it is good for you and the environment and best of all, it works.  

The price of free shipping

Most of the times when I buy things online, I consider shipping cost and the reliability of the store to make my decision. So far, most of the times I have used the free shipping and have gotten it shipped to a place where there is somebody to receive (office or home) and sometimes they have left it at the door step of my apartment. I haven’t lost anything so far but the incident I witnessed yesterday has made me think twice on leaving at the door step.

Yesterday when I was heading to office, I noticed a trashed box right outside my door. The box had Amazon.com logo on it, first thought was that my wife must have left it there for me to throw it into the dumpster on the way to office. Another glance at the same I saw words “Nikon VR 70-300” on a box sitting inside this  big box. I do not own anything remotely Nikon and nor have I ordered the same. So, second thought was that one of the neighbors must have left it outside their apartment and wind flew it to mine, but there wasn’t any gusty wind the previous night.  Upon further observation, it wasn’t trash after all, the box at some point contained a Nikon 70-300mm lens, it was addressed to my neighbor who lives downstairs and it had been vandalized. I took the package to my neighbor and handed him what was left of the Nikon lens.

The funny part is, those who vandalized left all the packing back and took only the lens and had left the hood and the pouch that came in the box. They probably could have made more money if they had taken the rest of the things along with the the lens. The other question, why leave it in front of my apartment when the trash is a block away?, I do not know the answer.

It taught me the lesson that it is not worth the free shipping if the shipping only entails leaving at the door step, if nobody will be home to receive the package. Come to think further, who is responsible for these lost shipments?, I am sure both the carrier and the shipment owner will deny responsibility. There used to be a time when the carriers used to either leave a note at the apartment door or leave the item at at the apartment office, they no longer seem to do it. I like USPS better in that sense for they would either leave it at the package box near mail box or will keep it with them for us to go and pick up. “long live USPS”.