90% of the classic direct mail packages I get at home come from charities, causes, politicians or good old National Geographic.
          I have a dozen on my desk at the moment: six in #10 OEs, one in a #9, four  in the 6” x 9” format, which I’m not fond of, one 7” x 5” and one 7 5/8” x 5 1/2”. I want to look at the letters which fascinate me.
          The #9 package has a short letter from the editor of National Geographic’s Traveler magazine. It’s pretty good even though it’s disguised as a lift note on one side of a single 7” x 7” sheet of paper folded to 3 1/2” x 7”. Here’s the outside front:

          There’s a lame attempt in the letter to manufacture a meaningful difference between tourist and TRAVELER. In real life, it’s a mundane distinction, isn’t it? A tourist is a traveler who goes to a place to see what there is to see. A non-tourist traveler goes because he has to, like a refugee, business traveler, someone moving to a new town, someone going back home, going to a convention, heading off to war.
NG Traveler’s editor seems to think tourists are uncool. Maybe he finds the Bermuda shorts, explorer hat with chin strap, sandals with socks and sun block off-putting. Here’s the letter.

          Not bad. I haven’t seen a letter with the writer’s photo on it for a while. I imagine this one’s here because the editor looks like a guy who might have been playing canasta in Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh when the last US chopper lifted off our embassy roof in Saigon. 
          The serif font is a good size and easy to read. Best of all, the first two paragraphs are about the reader. My guess is that this would appeal to someone who’d die of embarrassment if anyone thought her a tourist. 
          I think it would be better as a real letter, front and back of an 8 1/2” x 11”, with a few examples of the places on which National Geographic Traveler has shone its light. A few small type testimonials in the margin would help, too – little snippets:
“We read the article
about the Hutu B&B
in Kigali and decided
to go. A tad too
essentially unique if
you ask us.”
Tom and Mary J.
Teaneck, NJ

          I’d try giving the reader more credit – elevate her to my own lofty level – and use that platform to build on shared experiences. 

You can’t get out of the damned store!
You go out to get three things: cat food, bourbon and fresh fruit. Three different stores and, if you’re like me, the odds are pretty good you’ll walk out of all three without buying anything. The problem is the same everywhere: long lines with little hope of reasonable progress in any of them.
I’ve been walking out of stores for years but I just started keeping track 6 months ago. I walk away when whatever I’m trying to buy isn’t worth the wait. That happens 40 to 50% of the time.
I used to think it was always the stores’ fault, mostly for not having enough open checkout lanes and for minor stupidities like out of date price codes and clerks grumbling with each other about actually having to work. But once I started paying attention, I realized that it’s almost always the customers’ fault.
It doesn’t take much. You’ve seen it a million times. One cretin in a line can hold up everything. The most common is the surprised customer, surprised that she actually has to pay for stuff. The clerk says “That’ll be $82.40” and surprised customer starts digging into a purse so big that it has to be checked on airplanes. Somewhere in there is her wallet and you wait, resisting the urge to bop her over the head with your bottle of Gato Negro, while she digs it out and then rifles through it looking for a card that isn’t maxed out. Half the time she’s talking on her cell phone while she does this and you, hemmed in front and rear by other people’s shopping carts, have to listen. It’s a blessing when she speaks a language you don’t understand.
You’ve seen the price checker who waits until something is rung up, notices the actual price and decides not to buy it. This means removing the item from the computerized cash register’s memory.
They argue about prices and sales. “No sir. The 2 for 1 is on the 2 liter Cokes, not the 6 packs of cans.” They argue about expired coupons. They split orders, sometimes three or four ways and always get the wrong thing in the wrong order. It goes on and on.
The double latte with a shot of decaff espresso, vanilla and soy milk (isn’t there a way old school coffee drinkers can get a cup of joe with nothing in it but coffee?) The sweater that she wonders if it can be in another color and can somebody go look. The husband who gets into line while the wife is off somewhere still shopping, or, more likely, wandering around aimlessly bumping into displays.
Two types of time eaters get free passes: moms with little kids (we’ve all been there) and geezers (we’re all heading there).
At a rough guess, 20% of the customers in any given line are wasting your time – thoughtlessly, stupidly! Short of dragging them out to the parking lot and locking them in the trunks of their cars overnight, there’s not much you can do about the morons, but some stores are trying.
Costco and Walmart are good at fast checkouts, so is Macy’s. No problem in the real upscale stores. Winn Dixie, a supermarket chain in Florida, has check-yourself-out lanes and they work pretty well although every now and then a moron manages to screw them up.
Eventually technology will come up with a solution. It’ll probably involve hand held terminals that allow pre-registered customers to scan items as they go into the shopping cart and pay for them with a quick card wipe. There’ll be a bagging area and the occasional spot check for thieves. Until then, I try to shop as late or as early as possible. See you there.
Something about this sad situation reminds me of why newspapers and magazines are going out of business and nobody with a IQ above body temperature watches network news anymore. They blame the Internet while at the same time they go out of their way to irritate their logical core market – drive people away and smile smugly while they’re doing it. Retailers are probably doing the same thing without the smugness. I’d rather buy things in a store, and I would do it more often, if only I could get in and out without being driven batty.

Another buck slip/order form and BRE in a #10 OE arrived yesterday.
This one came from the NY Times and it’s more or less exactly the same as recent mailings from all kinds of magazines like Fortune, Time, Money, Newsweek.
I’ve finally figured out why none of these august publications bother with letter, brochure or lift note: they have nothing to say about anything, including themselves.
The Times (and, to a lesser extent, Newsweek and Time) has a real problem in direct mail: no matter how brilliant their list strategy, at least 50% of the mailings are going to land with a klunk in the mailboxes of people who hate their guts.
For at least 75 years, the Times has been printing flat out lies in stories that sing the glories of communism (Walter Duranty reporting on Stalin’s Russia), furiously florid fawning over commies (Herbert Matthews reporting on and interviewing Castro), making stuff up (Jayson Blair in just about everything he wrote), printing all the latest news about the US’s top secret weapons in the war on terror (the whole damned rag), and generally behaving as if the paper’s owners were in the employ of whoever’s the country’s enemy du jour.
I guess they think we haven’t noticed.
The Times has one of the oddest business models of all time: their target audience is people who read newspapers. In general, that’s older white guys. Older white guys tend not to be left wing dopes.
And yet the Times keeps flying along on one wing, the wrong one for its business.

Four catalogs arrived in Monday’s mail. One of them came from a company called Acorn which specializes in BBC videos and other stuff for the granola/ PBS/ Kumbaya crowd.

It seems to be a harmless enough company but it’s going to need a new name thanks to the ascendency of an organization of political thugs called ACORN: Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
That got me thinking about unfortunate names of companies and products.
I still get email from HoMedics which is a very funny name, indeed.
You probably know about American Motors (1954-1987) whose bosses once thought it would be a good idea to name a car Matador, apparently under the impression that it means bull fighter. It means Killer.
Chevrolet had a minor problem in Latin America with its Nova car; no va means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish. Might as well call it el Clunker.
My all time fave came when PET, a dry milk, moved into the Canadian market without much thought. PET (pet) means “fart” in French. Beaucoup hilarity in Québec grocery stores.
Lately we’ve been seeing more and more weird names for all kinds of products. Prescription drugs lead the way but nobody knows enough about them to care. You can call a drug anything at all. Oddly, they all seem to have two names; one is a scientific name and the other is, I guess, a nickname. Bladder control drugs are a good example, scientific name first, nickname in brackets: Oxybutynin (Ditropan), Tolterodine (Detrol), Darifenacin (Enablex), Solifenacin (Vesicare), Trospium (Sanctura), Fesoterodine (Toviaz).
Imagine giving your product two names and neither of them actually means anything. A breakthrough is right round the corner; all it’ll take is someone with the cojones to say “Hey! Let’s call it PNA: Pee Normally Again.”
Once upon a time car names were either alphanumeric like X4Ti or XKE. More often they were actual words: Biscayne, Impala, Bonneville, Corvette, Cobra, Dart, Taurus, Tempo. Even Rolls Royce’s Phateon was named after the son of the sun god, Helios.
Most of those names are still around but now we’re being tortured with car names that are just nonsense syllables: Elantra, Galant with one l, Prius, Altima, Axxess, Azera, Camry, Celica, Cressida (this is actually a woman’s name or at least what a medieval writer thought a Trojan woman’s name might be).
Does all of this give meaninglessness a new meaning? Maybe it’s SOP in a soulless global market nowadays: names that don’t mean anything to anyone at all?

It’s safe enough. Apparently it’s the inside workers who go postal.
Most mailmen (and mailwomen) are pleasant and, like everyone else on the planet, doubly pleasant when you’re talking about them. I usually ask “How’s business?” and they usually tell me.
Lately, the post office’s business has been in a death spiral which is a shame because targeted addressed direct mail is still the best way to generate profitable response and start long term relationship with customers.
One “solution” the post office is likely to try is dropping Saturday delivery. That probably makes sense but, what with unions and the most egregiously moronic Congress in the history of this great Republic, making sense has nothing to do with anything.
“So,” I asked a friendly mailperson, “what’ll happen to jobs in the good old USPS if they ever do get around to dropping Saturday?”
“We’ll lose about 50,000 full time employees.”
“What?”

Life’s about to get a lot more expensive thanks to the skyrocketing cost of government.
Government debt is about four times what it was last year and growing so fast that sooner or later our children are going to issue licenses to hunt us down.
Taxes of all kinds and at all levels are zooming as government entitlements grow like kudzu.
Politicians (is there a dirtier word?) are voting on unread bills for earthshaking legislation on healthcare deform and energy folicy, either of which would add costs unimaginable in our country’s previous 233 years. Combined, they’re one-two death punches.
In the meantime, direct marketers have to figure out how to survive for the few years we have left before the birth of the new and Constitution-free America. Here are some tips:
· Nobody’s going to have much money, so carve out a niche as the lowest cost provider of whatever it is you provide. Price and other cost-reducing offers will be the only things that matter.
· Avoid states like California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey. People in those places won’t have money for McDonald’s, if they even have a McDonald’s.
· Forget about accepting credit cards. There won’t be any. Mugabe-like inflation will make it impossible for banks to run that part of their business. Take checks only and walk them to the bank. Don’t ship until they clear.
· Rethink your web, email and TV strategy. Those things need electricity and we won’t have much of that.
· Start a barter club.

We’ve got about a year, two tops. Good luck.