I have a long and glorious history of complaining about the annual attack of the Yellow Pages, White Pages, Yellow Books. Here I am on my old marketing blog, in January 200,9 and here’s a Pink Slip post from just a couple of months ago. I also did a slightly more benevolent read on Yellow Pages in 2007 – ages ago, for sure.
Yellow Pages (and variants thereof) are on my mind because yesterday I performed my annual ritual: The Dumping of the Phone Books, in which I place a couple of dozen Yellow Pages, White Pages, and Yellow Books into recycle bags, and leave them out for the recycling truck, which roams the neighborhood today.
I live in a six-unit condo building, and – blame it on the landlines – more than six of each of these books are delivered to our building every year.
They’re left on the top step, and I’m, invariably, the one who brings them in.
I leave them in the communal foyer, on the communal table, for a few days. My watchful waiting period.
The other residents of the building either a) ignore them entirely, or b) toss one into the communal recycling basket that sits in the communal foyer.
I am the emptier of the communal recycling basket. And the cleaner-upper of the communal table.
Thus, I am the one schlepping the full complement of Yellow/White Pages from the front of the house (where they’re dropped off) to the back of the house (where the trash guys pick up).
In a couple of hours, they will be removed from their perch on the snow bank out back, and tossed into the maws of the recycle truck. Or into the non-caring, non-discriminating general purpose garbage truck, that I occasionally catch grabbing the recycle. (In much the same way as, years ago, I observed my company’s cleaning staff emptying the waste baskets and the blue recycle tubs into the same trash bucket.)
Personally, having done my best, I don’t care whose maw these books end up in, as long as they’re out of our foyer.
Satan, be gone!
Still, I do have to wonder what the business impetus is behind continually producing directories that no one under the age of 91 refers to – I’m using the “if she were alive” age of my mother here. How do they continue to con businesses into thinking it makes sense to appear in a paper directory, which 99.99% of the time ends up in the dump or in the recycle brew?
I get that you’d want to be in their online directory, but who’s buying the quarter-page ads these days? (I could tell you if I hadn’t already jettisoned the stash sent to our business; and, as of this blogging, I am not going to chance the snow, ice, and gloom of night out there in order to retrieve one to take a look.
Truly, I can’t conceive of what the long-run business model is here.
I did see something in the papers – read, by the way, online – that quoted someone official as raving about how these tomes are now all on recyclable paper. But recycling still takes energy, etc., and wouldn’t it be, overall, a more kindly gesture to Mother Earth to just give up on printing them entirely.
Let those who need them order them. (Online.)
Let those who need them pay for them – or get subsidized by those of us who cast kindly eyes on 91 year olds who need to look up a new optometrist, or a florist where they can order a bouquet of white roses for their great-granddaughters First Holy Communion. Or whatever.
Hey, I’ve worked in some de-pressing places over the years.
You know the type: keep re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; keep holding up that wall, while the opposite wall collapses, conking you (and everyone else in its path) on the noggin; the “we’re, alas, ahead of the market” kinds of places; the “we’re, alas, behind the market” kinds of places.
I know, up close and personal, what it’s like to be in a failing organization.
But I am singularly lacking in the imagination that would enable me to truly picture what it must be like to work in sales or marketing for “The Pages” businesses.
Talk about buggy whips at ten paces.
As the Irish say, I’m sorry for your troubles.
But not sorry enough to do anything but toss these bad-boys into the recycle bucket.
(And, yes, I have tried calling/e-mailing to get delivery stopped.)
3 comments:
Sounds like you would have difficulty grasping why making $70-100k a year in YP sales was like. News flash: not everyone is wired or has a 4G phone on their hip like you. Hence, some 12+ billion look ups still occur in those "tomes"
It is true that not everyone is wired. That is JUST the market I'm trying to reach! Someone who is either too poor to afford a network connection, or else too ignorant to use a FREE library connection or free wi-fi hotspot! Yeah bingo! Maybe all of the ads consist of listings for homeless shelters or rehab programs? Who knows?
All I know is that I've regularly gone through the exact same ritual, every year, just like nearly everyone else in Boston. Same goes for the hundreds of useless catalogs foisted upon me from that loving couple, Harry & David, or the millions of JC Penney catalogs that meet a similar fate in my mailbox, despite never having ordered anything from a printed catalog, ever, in my life.
I'm guessing that, conservatively, 50% of these directories get tossed or recycled. Before they're tossed on everyone's doorstep, there should be some type of opt-out communication for those that don't want them. Those who want to "let their fingers to the walking" would be able to continue to do so.
Further, I do feel sorry for those who produce the directories. It must be disheartening to work in an industry that is clearly on the wane.
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