money management

Think of the puppies: stop sending me free stuff!

Puppy in a box.I love free stuff. Who doesn’t?

I also love puppies (and to a lesser degree, kitties). Again, most people do…or at least, very few people actively hate puppies or kitties.

But what I don’t love is waste, especially when it means spending money on things you don’t even need.

Which is why, in addition to heaping loads of love and spoiling on my own Big Dog and Little Dog, I donate whenever I can to the local SPCA, ASPCA, and the lovely no-kill shelter we got BD and LD from.

I don’t know if it’s because of that, or because I subscribed to Dog Fancy magazine and got on some mailing list, but over the past few months, I have been swamped with free address labels from every pet rescue organization you can imagine.

It was kind of cute at first: free address labels with adorable animals on them! But now, I’m actually to the point where I’m happy to open up a solicitation envelope and not find any freebies in it.

Why? Because the sheer amount of pretty, adorable address labels (usually several sheets in an envelope), plus the cost of postage to send them out, plus the fact that I’ve gotten multiple sets of labels from the same organizations over the past few months, could probably wind up feeding a dog or cat for a few months.

(I tried taking a pic of the ridiculous stack of label we’ve built up, but I’m not too tech savvy and couldn’t figure out a way to do it with my smartphone that didn’t show our home address very clearly.) 🙂

I kind of want to write these organizations back and say please keep the labels and the postage, and take whatever money you would have spent on them and give it back to the animals instead. I can’t donate to every group that mails me, but I can at least stop the waste. I may be keeping these labels (and probably using them till I’m 80 and they finally run out!), but I’m sure plenty of people are just tossing them, wasting the group’s money and filling landfill space.

Does anyone else get swamped by unnecessary free stuff like this? Is there anything I can do about it?

 

~Heart,

Em

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photo credit: BuzzFarmers

6 Comments

    • You’re the best! I hate all the junk mail and catalogs I get too…We recycle them, but it still feels like such a waste. Checking this out now. Thanks!

  • I try to use the address lables to mark whats mine that I carry out, such as my stapler at the office. want them to know its mine, left one job and a co-worker accused me of stealing my own office supplies.

    • Creative way to make use of them! I’m always lending my books to friends…I bet I could use my labels for that!

  • I have the same problem! And then I’ve moved enough that I have stacks and stacks of labels with the wrong address and I’m struggling to find ways to use them so that I don’t just throw them in a landfill!

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