I have a PO Box that receives all of my bills, etc. because for some reason I felt that USPS would be reliable in this domain where they have failed in so many others. When I visit the post office to fish mail out of this box every two weeks or so it is invariable overflowing with direct [junk] mail advertising. I’ve used services like CatalogChoice.org to successfully end delivery of unwanted catalogs and some of the mail is from organizations that I’ve donated money or property to (which is sad because now when I get ready to donate to an organization that I haven’t donated to before I get a flash of my overflowing PO Box getting fuller yet). None of these junk mail sources, however, compare to the venerable American Express marketing machine. I am a card holder of their’s but am on the paperless billing system so literally none of the mail they send me has anything to do with my account. In fact, they often try to get me to sign up for the very card I carry in my wallet. I get probably 10-15 pieces per month from them ranging from credit card offers to vacation offers to mortgage offers.

Having recently been inconvenienced by this waste of paper and time spent at the post office, I decided to give their general customer service line a call (800-528-4800) to see if there was anything I could do to stop the flow. Their always-friendly agent responded immediately to my request to be removed from the direct mail list as if she’d been training for it for months. She then went into script mode and quickly read me the list of things I was being opted out of. Within seconds I zoned out and tried to politely let her finish (for some reason I feel guilty hanging up prematurely on overly-polite customer service people). A few key words in her monotone caught my attention, though, so I grabbed a pen and asked her to repeat the list, more slowly this time. Here is how it read:

“You are now being opted out of the following programs with American Express:

1. Telemarketing
2. Banking offers
3. Offers from 3rd parties (little scary)
4. Amex news (huh?)
5. Affiliate sharing of credit history & report (WOW)
6. American Express sweepstakes”

The entire call took about 3 minutes and after letting my mind wander on #5 for another 3 minutes, I decided to post this entry.

Incidentally, this got me search for other opt-out stories and I came across this nice and compact opt-out script.