Poll of the Day > Paper ads in mail boxes make no sense any more

(+) Yeah! (+)

Oh, the ads help pay for the mailbox

"help" pay... not wholly pay. So if all you get is only ads, this means you (or your landlord or whoever covers your mailboxes) are actually PAYING to receive ads.

I can't say I've ever heard of the idea that paper ads help pay for mailboxes, except maybe community mailboxes run by the post office. For personal mailboxes, that's 100% on the property owner in every case I know of. Even so, only covering part of the cost doesn't mean the box provider is paying to receive ads so much as it means they're paying to provide you with mail service, with ads meaning they can pay less.

They give me paper I can use in my charcoal chimney starter. Beyond that though, they are quite useless.

Funny thing, is I tried going to the website on the back of the ads and opting out of them. No dice.

who is paying for a non-po box mailbox

I use them to clean messes and sometimes to keep things from breaking when I mail stuff out.

man I got almost no junk at my old place, but here I get a bucket load every week, it's terrible

Weekly ads pay for USPS security boxes? Huh?

That's what I have as opposed to a personal one, but I don't pay for it.

I just have a sticker that says no un-addressed advertisements or door to door magazines.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


that's just the excuse they give in Canada.

For all I know the boxes are free and landlords get to pocket the ad revenue

EDIT:, also, welcome back zang

wait I thought that stamps pay for the mailbox?

Zangulus posted...

Oh, it's a Canadian thing. Interesting.

They probably need special mailboxes to hold all their milk bags.

Lokarin posted...

that's just the excuse they give in Canada.

For all I know the boxes are free and landlords get to pocket the ad revenue

EDIT:, also, welcome back zang

I know for a lot of neighbourhoods, Canada Post has switched from doing door-to-door delivery and instead uses community mailboxes. That might be what they're talking about, in which case those are paid for by Canada Post. It wouldn't apply to houses that still get door-to-door delivery (in which case the mailbox was paid for when you bought it at Home Depot) or apartment/condo buildings that have an in-building mailbox (that would be paid for by the landlord and covered by your rent/condo fees). Some buildings might have struck a deal with some advertisers to send ads to their mailboxes (in which case, I'd expect the junk mail to be addressed to specific units instead of just being a blanket "deliver this to everybody" sort of deal) in exchange for a bit of revenue, but in that case it's less explicitly paying for the mailbox and more covering the general expenses of the building(/lining the landlord's pockets).

Either way, I avoid most junk mail with a "no flyers please" sticker on my mailbox.

Add the no unaddressed mail sticker to your box.