Every day in my house I throw away between one and five catalogs that arrive in my mail. Most of them come unsolicited - actually all of them come unsolicited as I never signed up to receive any of them. A few, however, have been welcome over the years and they continue to come because I have purchased something that I saw on their pages.
For years, though, I have been troubled by the waste that they represent. How many trees must be cut down just to print them? It must be an enormous amount. And now, with each of the companies that publish catalogs also having websites, it has become quite easy to just go on line when you are in the market for something. So catalogs, for me at least, have become unnecessary.
However, companies don't just want to sell things to people who already know what they are looking for. They want to sell to people who are relatively satisfied with what they have, at least until they see that new gadget or special dress or fancy cookware in a catalog. Sears knew this decades ago when they began sending out their Wishbook at Christmas time. Kids looked through it, found toys they had never seen before, and made up their list for Santa.
Today, a catalog is something you might just browse through after work when you look through the rest of your mail. All it takes for the catalog to pay for itself is for one thing in that catalog to catch your eye. Even if you don't order it immediately, your brain is primed to think about it, and eventually to want it. You may pick up the phone and order it in a day or two, or wait until you go into the store and buy it then. Either way, the psychology of the catalog has worked.
To my thinking, the enormous number of catalogs that flow uninvited into our homes, while beneficial to the companies that publish them, have created many problems for our society. One has already been mentioned - the destruction of our forests. Another is enticing people to buy things they don't need, creating clutter and storage problems for us as we run out of room to put the special decor for Christmas that is used only two weeks out of the year, the latest cleaning gadget that doesn't really save us time, the fiftieth pair of shoes that we wear only once, and the toys that our children spread all over the house. Finally, in enticing us to buy so many things we don't need, catalogs deplete our bank accounts and run up our credit card debt.
Finally, there is hope - a way to stop the flow of catalogs to your home, to stop the destruction of the forests, the cluttering of your house, and the enticement to buy things you will only regret later.
