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ENVIROMAIL

From the beginning, our direct mail product has sparkled with all glamour the graphic arts could bestow, inventing many new appearances and resolving the older ones in the steadfast certainty of a very high form.

These traits will never diminish, and will only improve with our determination to lead the ways of commerce with the apt use of the printed and mailed word in its best presentments.

The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is waste neither time nor money, but make the best of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do; with them, everything. -- Benjamin Franklin.

And now we have arrived at the crossroads of mixing our continued growth with the natural need to answer our critics with more than our words, but with our accomplishments, in growth, and in leadership.

We must not shrink from the knowledge that we impart on our environs, yes, strong commercial development, and too, the papers and materials we use to construct this advancement.

As we proceed to put into the hands of millions of Americans, virtually all of them, our gifts and their desires, we shall need to adjust the contents of that delivery evermore contentiously. For without this commitment, the tonnage of our processes will surely rise to equal the weight of controversy such material growth will provoke.

Imagine with me, if you will, some 200,000,000,000 pieces of mail delivered annually. This the base amount we need to improve upon. We need to move it upward to 225b, and 250b, and to the magic level that supports sound consumer growth and commercial satisfaction for all our partner customers who plan, promote and distribute their never-ending pageant of ideas and services in this our ever-expanding miracle economy.

We can do the first part, the growth, with the continued dedication, belief and trust our customers hold out for us; but we owe them another service, and that is to do it all with less and less. Less expense, less uncertainty, less distraction from competing forms; and, very seriously, less tonnage. This is the order of the day: let's grown up our positive contributions, strengthening America's position in a competitive world landscape; and let's grown down all our unnecessary side effects, such as increased costs, and the questions of waste disposal that 50b additional mailpieces will establish.

Prosperity is the fruit of labor. Teach economy. That is one of the first and highest virtues. It begins with saving money. -- Abraham Lincoln.

For the above cause I will put forth the new concept of growing down our continued prosperity, and living down the voices of woe our continuing product superiority has made always painfully audible.

We can think of ourselves as a 430-pound Suma Champion who's been advised to take care of his heart muscle. Yes, he bench presses his entire weight, but the stress he engages is killing him. He makes appointment with Jack LaLanne. Jack surveys his waistline and biceps and after a moment's contemplation declares, "I can reduce your body weight by 40 percent, and increase your strength per pound by the same degree. This means after one year's intensive training you will weigh 260 pounds, and you will still bench press 430. You will return to you heart doctor and he will stammer, `This is wonderful; your heart is improved to a well-state condition; your stress is diminished; and all your danger signs have fallen off-scale low!'.''

Considering this wrestler's youthful age of less than mid-life, the doctor predicts for him a long and happy future, something he last year could have never imagined.

Our wrestler leaves the health studio considering all his options, his past habits, and all the notions that learning a new lifestyle of leveraged mechanics could mean for him. It's all so foreign to his way of thinking that he becomes frightened at the prospects. How can I elevate that weight with a slight frame of 260? The load will crush me and I shall die in an accident of foolishness such as my competitors will never forget. I will be a laughing stock in my own profession, and the voices of ambivalence will be righted against me, forever.

On the other hand, I see no good prospects for continuing as I am. A dead man can lift nothing at all. Perhaps I can learn to leverage my frame to make the lift, and maybe I can learn to order and consume the light fare and still continue to grow in a prosperity of even greater success.

All this I must now consider, as my heart beats without ceasing, and I must plan to make the changes of my habits, if I am to follow this new path.

It's not as though I have to work any harder to attain Jack's goals; I already put forth a professional schedule. All I do it alter the way I build, and therein is my difference.

For all my uncertainty, he thinks, what I need is more incentive.

With that thought in mind, we return to our arena, that of our businesses. And we too think: yes, incentive, such a lovely term. Of course we can do it, if we have incentive....

The next step in my roadmap for peace is to consider the source for any possible incentive. If we think long and hard, there is one outstanding prospect, the Postal Service itself. We reason, its rates are already inflated; it needs growth; it needs profits and earnings; and it is a major beneficiary of any reduced tonnage. Say for instance if we could propose to the Service that we will enter an astounding new volume of 33 percent greater piece count, but the weight of our loads will be 40 percent lighter than before. It comes to some 88,000 tons of reduced weight per billon pieces of increase, but that's only for the new volume. If we could begin to save 88,000 tons, times the 200b piece already flowing, that would be 17,600,000 tons of weight reduction.

We need incentive to make the mail lighter, and our customers need incentives to buy more, and the Service needs prompting to reduce the total load of its burden by 40 percent; and with all this in mind, the bold and strategic thing to do is announce, yes, a conservative price reduction of exactly 33 percent for all new mail that enters the system as Enviromail.

It's brilliant! We will have a new product line to tout. We will attract very much new interest and usage; and we will have, for once, a very sound answer for our environmental friends, as we are saving resources at a level never drempt possible just last year. If the economy grows, which it could not escape, we will have achieved a growth stimulous that not even $500b of tax reductions could put on the table. Newspapers will be forced to write documentaries on our successes with the enthusiasm of Homer. History will be made, we will emerge no longer junk, but, Enviromail!

If we can engage green support; lead consumers with the disposal plans that enable recycling; show economic stimulation; pick up forestry sponsorship, and put our creative minds to the challenge of making Enviromail more attractive than heavy mail, more productive than heavy mail, and a compliment to and extension of paper recycling, already so widely accepted and sought, there are many new vistas we can tower over. The limits of these new possibilities are as fresh and imaginative as we would care to wonder. All it takes is leadership, determination, incentive, and, most of all, the confidence to stand before our industry's naysayers in a turning of public opinion that is already twenty years too late in arriving. Please see our complete resource link below on ``powermailing'' for other dynamic new concepts for the furtherance and advancement of the direct mail industry in America.

Coming soon to this website, we will enumerate the exact specifications, the specific types of new, high-opacity papers and self-depleting adhesives and window patches that make the entire plan self-executing, just for the general good of it. We will also look at the manner in which green and political support can be engendered for our greater gain. And in this respect I highly commend all readers to write and think and document and suggest any type of helpful underpinning for this opportunity, and forward that to us so that it can be placed in the open view of the public. By these means our plans have a mental birth and gain a wider discussion.

Addendum

The nucleus of the foregoing idea goes back to one of my earliest experiences in business, that of handling an importation of goods from the Orient on behalf of a corporate buyer. I was young and green, and certainly hadn't handled much mail at all, and no foreign mail that I could recall. It seems that, soon, importation becomes a business of letters. Letters from import agents, from foreign banks, from our domestic banks, and finally, lo and behold, the foreign manufacturer itself. As the correspondence began to fly I soon held in my paws a most-peculiar species of mail such as I'd never encountered. We had the red-and-green ribbed Air Mail in those days, and that was a bit novel; but the materials of the foreign mail, alone, were a just fascination. Light as a feather. I would hold up the sheets and examine them in long gazes. How do they do it, I wondered. This stuff makes the ``paper thin'' of my experience seem like a cardboard box. And yet, it's wonderfully elegant, it has a brilliance, texture and crispness that makes our reply stock seem dull and grossly excessive. I knew then that if I could shift my own use to this new paradigm of their invention, I would for sure. It just made more base sense. But, methinks, they just do it because of the air transportation over the oceans, to keep the planes aloft. Only years later in another time did I discover that, no, no. They do it always as a matter of course, even if the thing were to be floated over in a heavy container. I was all the more impressed. --Bryant Martin, May, 2003.

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