Save a tree. Kill your phone book.
I’ve made fun of the yellow pages — those antiquated bricks of cut trees — for many years. I even registered some domain names related to opting out of receiving the books (which for me go straight into the trash): CancelPhonebooks.com and PhonebookOptOut.com.
Now residents of Seattle can opt out of receiving their Yellow Pages.
Predictably, the Yellow Pages industry is fighting this in court. This means they don’t care about the value their advertisers receive; people who opt out clearly aren’t interested in viewing ads in the Yellow Pages. Delivering a book to them anyway just increases the number of households they can say received the book even if it went straight into the trash.
Since last Thursday 14,000 people and businesses have already opted out, reports The Seattle Times.
Elephants are People Too says
I marked “return to sender” on mine this year not sure if they would take them back or not, but to my surprise they sent the books back to the Real Yellow Pages. 🙂
Bo says
I don’t think I would spend the time to opt out but I have been throwing my phonebooks in the garbage for years. Does anyone still use them? It is so much easier to Google to get the phone number.