Advertising flyers ...

Opening mail boxes can be a real chore especially when one finds lots of advertisements stashed in the already small mail box. Look, I am talking about mail boxes that receive snail mails and not those that you have on your computer screen with different folders of 'inbox' , 'outbox' with lots of unlimited space.

Can you imagine how many advertisements we come across daily? I have been trying to find out from the internet the actual figure but can't seem to find the answer. My guess is that of about 40 - 50 advertisements daily. These advertisements can be in the form of flyers, billboards, placards, radio jingles, sponsors etc.

Back to the advertising flyers I received in my mail box. I realised it can be frustrating having to throw these slips of papers, some have the size as small as a business card and some as big as an A4 sized paper. Can you imagine the number of trees cut down due to these circulation of endless advertising? Its simply outrageous.

How often do we keep these flyers that we find in mailboxes? Are they even useful at all? With the internet age, all we need to do is make a few clicks on the mouse and there, you'll find what you need on Google, Yahoo or any other search engines you may be using. So why the need for paper flyers distribution?

I just find it a hassle when my hands are already filled with so many bills and government notices yet I still have to sort the mails out and throw the flyers away. Maybe we should just each have an individual 'junk' box like those that we have in our virtual world by courtesy of Microsoft Outlook. We can perhaps label this new box 'Spam' box.

Close your eyes and think. See yourself walk towards the mailbox. Two of them in front of you. To the left, normal mailbox that stores your bills and government notices and to the right, 'Spam' mail where all advertisements are placed. You decide not to look into the 'Spam' box but only that of your normal mailbox. You press a button on the 'Spam' mailbox and whatever is in the box will just flush itself into a recyling bin. No hassle, no need to filter unwanted junk mail.

If someone could really invent some sort of mailbox like what you have just imagined, we save paper and can also send out a message advertisers to think of better ways of advertising than to place flyers into mailboxes. This will also save the cleaners in our neighbour extra job of picking littered advertising flyers often found on the floors near our mailboxes.