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Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The changing face of the inside of mailboxes

Wait a minute...do the insides of mailboxes have faces? No. Of course not. Then again...how would I know? I've never been in the inside of a mailbox. So should we go with this post title if it's inaccurate? Hey...look at it this way: if there's been some particularly gruesome mob hit and they wanted to send a message to the mail carrier, there might be a face on the inside of a mailbox. So let's stick with this title. Deal? Deal.

Walking down 16th on Monday, we went by a mailman emptying a mailbox at P Street. And I swear that at at least two-thirds of the contents was Netflix envelopes. Now, maybe it was because it was at the end of the weekend, and I'm sure it says something about the neighborhood that I was in, but I was pretty shocked that so much of the mail was taken up with those red envelopes, that the makeup of mail has changed so much in recent years. The USPS must be praising Netflix every day, and closely watching the development of online video delivery.

Anyway, point being is that I need that report on Netflix's percentage of US Mail on my desk by 5 pm.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to Netflix's website they mail 1.4 million DVDs each business day (they ship approx. 250 days/year). The USPS estimates it will deliver 95,884 million pieces of first class mail this year (including Saturdays they deliver approx. 302 days/year). If you double the Netflix volume to account for the customers mailing back their DVDs, that means roughly 0.73% of all first class mail is a Netflix envelope.

Sorry to disappoint you. I know you were hoping it would be more like 73%.

Reid said...

That's gotta be wrong. Netflix's percentage must be at least 75%. The rest is wedding invitations and Entertainment Weekly. The catalogs, credit card offers and ValuePak coupons aren't actually delivered by the USPS; they crawl up from the sewers.

This is according to an informal but highly scientific poll of my own mail.