Over the weekend, I went on a rant about the phone books sitting in my building’s lobby courtesy of YellowBook. While the quality wasn’t the best, the books got under my skin and are still annoying me because the pile is still there big as ever. You could call it overreacting, but let’s get a show of hands or Tweets here. How many of you still use a phone book?
I didn’t think so, it’s 2010 and there is this fancy thing out there called the Internet. YellowBook even acknowledges this new phenomenon on the cover on the front of their book. While the book may have been useful in the past, technology has made it obsolete. Perhaps the biggest reason that it bothers me is that it is a waste of paper, both the resource and the greenbacks being shelled out by companies to advertise in it.
PT Barnum famously noted that a sucker is born every minute, but I can’t see how any company would fall for the sales pitch. Everyone tosses out the phonebook and uses 411 or the net to grab numbers. The advertising is so archaic that it almost feels like companies just can’t let go to this bad relationship.
I also wonder how they get around the no mail lists. It is like the real-life version of SPAM, and I almost feel bad for
My gut feeling is to blame advertisers like BC for me getting phone books
the signature advertisers as they facilitate the annoyance to everyday folks with these books.
To cap off my tirade against the YellowBook is its humorous callout of Eco-friendly size – Packed with content in bold green typeface. How is the book eco-friendly when it winds up in the trash or blowing to pieces on someone’s doorstep?
[...] have made my love, or lack thereof, of the YellowBook (and here) well noted on this blog in the past, but it is not my most hated form of unsolicited [...]