Extremely annoying, fugly looking things sitting outside my house right now
  • R.B.
  • Extremely annoying, fugly looking things sitting outside my house right now

For a whole week. Getting wet, smelly. Seriously, I am pissed off. SuperMedia, you are not doing your job. I went to www.yellowpagesoptout.com last year and opted out, but we still keep getting this yellow stuff.

What bothers me is that even if I opted out for my apartment, unless all the other apartments opt-out, we will keep getting yellow pages. But I know that nobody wants them, ‘cos nobody ever picks them up. I am glad the city is regulating these guys.The Yellow Pages Association says that Seattle doesn’t need a city-enforced opt-out system (expected to be out in late spring), because YPA is coming up with something better. A one-stop national opt-out site which will let you enter your zip code and pick the yellow pages publications you don’t want delivered to your doorstep right then and there. (Right now the opt-out system provided by the Yellow Pages Association is rather cumbersome: you have to contact each yellow pages publisher individually to let them know you don’t want their books).

Yellow pages publishers have also argued at Seattle City Council meetings that their current opt-out system works (hello, pictorial evidence above proves it obviously doesn’t). Maggie Stonecipher of Dex One, Seattle’s biggest yellow pages publisher, says that her company provided numerical evidence to the City Council in support of this. The city chose not to hear that,” she said. “They only provided anecdotal evidence about how the current opt-out system doesn’t work.”

According to Stonecipher, when Dex One first started meeting with the city council in June to figure out a solution for unwanted yellow pages, approximately 11,000 people in Seattle had signed up for Dex’s opt-out system. Dex identified 56 failures. “We took that data and are working to improve it,” Stonecipher said. “We are researching where our process went wrong.” By October, Dex One had 17,000 people signed up for the opt-out program.

I was one of them. And I still get Dex and SuperMedia and the rest of the yellow junk. Someone help!

39 replies on “What Are These Friggin’ Annoying Things Doing Outside My House Even Though I Opted Out Like 6 Months Ago?”

  1. Well, the opt out thing obviously doesn’t work. How about we just ban unsolicited home delivery. If the yellow pages folks want to practice their free speech rights, they can sell their publication in a book store like everyone else.

  2. I kept having this problem at my condo building…called the publisher and told them we collectively did not want their book and to never deliver again. Of course they did, at which point I called them and told them if they did not remove them I was reporting them for dumping on our property. They came and picked them up.

    From City of Seattle Website:

    “To report illegal dumping, call the Solid Waste Utility Illegal Dumping Hotline at 684-7587”

  4. It’s a huge problem for the waste stream. We subsidize recycling, which is a social good, and I suspect about 100 lbs per year (if not more) per household is f’ing phone books. I haven’t looked in one for several years.

  7. @ 1: Agreed!
    Save some trees and enforce a nationwide Opt In program instead. That way only the people who take the time to order phone books will get them delivered.

    These “Opt Out” programs demonstrate a pro-corporate bias is in the air and everywhere. Better beg your corporate overlords for privacy, now!

  14. I have opted out every year and still get them too. Worse, over half the time they deliver by throwing them in the grass on the busy street side at the bottom of a steep hill, where I typically don’t see them for months since my house is nearer the back alley. So when I do find them, they are joined with lots of other trash that people have determined they can just litter in my yard, since I obviously haven’t cared about the phone book trash…it’s a lovely cycle…

  17. Sadly, I think we need to start throwing these in the landfill bin. That way, maybe someone will watch all the waste and give a shit. I’m not going to hold my breathe. They do know we have the internet right? And it completely destroyed everything their book used to be?

  18. @16 That might be a more reasonable statistic.

    Look at @4. Tell me how 100lbs of phone books per household per year is not hyperbole. I used to get yellow and white pages for both MPLS & St. Paul. Maybe 15 lbs total.

    Literally.

  19. The most horrifying thing happened to me: I got the phone book on my door step. I can’t explain the total terror that filled my eyes when I looked upon those jaundice colored pages. And the very worse part of it? I had to pick them up ( I KNOW!!) and carry them to the recycling bin in the alley.

    Please someone have mercy!!! Oh sweet Lord the sheer humanity of it all!!!!

  20. Scoff all you want, @19, but that phone book used to be a tree, waving its branches in the wind…it was probably a baby tree at that, since the feller-bunchers came and took down all your old growth. Just think, if the Yellowpages company took all the money it spends printing phone books nobody wants, and donated that to local charities, well, Seattle would just be that much more awesome. And the Lorax would like you better, too.

  21. What about all those copies of The Stranger that people leave everywhere…buses, coffee houses, streets…they litter up the whole neighborhood.

  22. These “books” are printed and delivered for a reason. Why else would these various companies spend a ton of money doing so?

    Advertising revenue. They can sell ads in them and claim that the ad will be delivered to almost 100% of users. Better yet, it’s highly targeted advertising: when you look up “plumbers”, you see Joe the Plumber’s big old ad front and foremost.

    So, the pages folks have a big incentive to do this pointless thing, whether people use them or not; whether they destroy the environment or not.

    I propose a good old-fashioned boycott. Next time you get one, look up all your favorite categories of businesses; call them; tell them that you will no longer be using their business/service because they are helping to perpetuate this blight.

    This’ll take concerted effort, and time to work. But we can do it if there’re enough of us doing so.

  23. Not only did I get a book, but the distributor trespassed in our secure-entry building to deliver the books. I also signed up for the opt-out program.

  24. isn’t it pulp? I hate em 2. wish 1 came every 2 yrs vs 10 a yr.
    -handy in power outage. I tear pages out for cleaning,starting a bon fire, etc but not like they r cutting trees down for em. thought it’s by prod/left over waste from the meat & tater’s side of logging.

  25. I posted earlier, but the fucking delivery boy buzzed my apartment, asked if I’d let him in so he could drop off the books, and I told him “No, no one here used those. We don’t want them.”

    He left them outside the front door.

    Fuck the phone books. Ban them outright.

  26. I have a better idea: Have the city set up a phone bank. If you have an unwanted phone book, the phone company gets a list that they must come out and pick up. With a fine attached.

  28. #27

    I’m at my mother’s house in Queens. I wanted to order a pizza from the place I saw down the street, but I didn’t know it’s name as I haven’t been around here much in the last few.

    So, Googled “pizza near 11420”. Then I found what looked like the place (Street view). I called the number and it just beeped, like a not in service (866 number). I went to the website URL. There was a set of links on a forum site, but no information…no menu, no prices.

    So then, I took the name of place from google maps and re-Googled it, and found a review on yelp with a different phone number. That number worked, and I ordered a Sicilian pie.

    That is why businesses are still “wasting their ad dollars” on yellow pages.

  29. This is simply a dying business model. What I don’t understand are the dinosaur businesses that continue to buy advertising in them.

  30. There’s another side to this that’s annoying as well: if you own or run a business those fuckers will call ALL THE FUCKING time and try to browbeat you into advertising with them.

    Phone books are a pestilence. May their CEOs be hung from their toenails.

  31. Everyone in the buidling must opt out. I have, but my neighbors have not. Yes, I asked them too, but they are not particularly good at anything other than drinking. I don’t let them stay on the porch though, I throw them out, why be bothered and angry every day?

  34. @29: “This is simply a dying business model. What I don’t understand are the dinosaur businesses that continue to buy advertising in them. “

    Some of them haven’t gotten the picture that these companies are lying to them about reach.

    I’m just fucking pissed off that the douchebag opt-out scheme is intended to collect our data and sell it off to others. You shouldn’t need to give telephone number and email, you shouldn’t even need to give your name.

  35. so, can i legally piss all over these books and dump them on their doorstep? it’ll smell as bad as all the rotten moldy ones left on mine.

  37. They pay the delivery drivers a pittance. Therefore, the drivers will just throw them wherever. It’s back-breaking (or at least bicep-injuring) work, paid by the number delivered. Lying about how many and where they went to was fairly easy. Apartments were great to dump a bunch of em. We had a general map, but probably got lots wrong. Also, we threw a bunch away and just claimed they were delivered. You’re welcome for that last part. 🙂

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