I have been working on a direct mail campaign for our team in many areas and we are finding that the yellow page listings and business list CDROMS contain so many closed companies that we are spending too much on the mailings which are opened a little less because of the anthrax scare. Even customized lists are of little value. No one is keeping these lists fresh and deleting the ole data. Book of Lists are outdated as soon as they come out, CDROMS rip people off by disallowing lots of search downloads, yellow pages forget it. Phone numbers are wrong, addresses are wrong as a matter of fact most business parks are 30% unoccupied, downtowns about 15% and industrial areas about 28% nationwide, so with all these jobs and companies gone, there is no one keeping track of the data. Yet we are told the recession is over? Whatever. Are we judging by the stock market? Because it is not real either.

The NASDAQ de-listed any company that might bring the market down over the last year and a half, except right after 9-11. It is a gambling casino anyway and the market always leads the real economy by 6 months. So if the market is just now going back up from its 9-11 average then we still have 6 months to get back to where we were then, which was terrible, remember all the lay offs before 9-11, starting back this time last year? Companies sell us lists all the time, the lists are wrong and rather than change the lists and update, they sell us old data and say we do not have the staff to fix the data more than once a year. Yet it needs to be changed every three months to even be + - 15% real. Yet if your Direct mail nets you only 1% we are really hurting. Direct Mail also termed junk mail is what pays for over 75% of the US Mail budget.

So if we lose the direct mail marketing technique we also raise our postal rates by that same percentage. Less mail means even higher prices. Big problems, since this is a major us infrastructure we need to keep civilization strong in America. If we replace the mail with e-mail then we will get tons of junk e-mail. Then important e-mails will be buried in 300 e-mails a day. Why doesnt the FTC look into the list makers and their advertising, they are way off when they tell you that their data bases are updated and are (+) (-) 2%. Small businesses are being hurt and that hurts America, since 2/3 rds of Americans are employed by small business and not by government.