For Those Who Died Recently, the Junk Mail Keeps Coming
Millions of people died last year, but their mail continues to arrive. Most of it is junk.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) estimates that the average American adult receives around 340 pieces of a mail a year, two thirds of which is from advertisers. With 3.1 million American deaths in 2020, that would mean that without any intervention, almost 700 million pieces of junk mail each year could be sent out to someone who is deceased. But there isn’t a simple way to make it stop.
“We can’t stop any junk mail from coming,” said Cynthia Isles from the Scarsdale Main Post Office. “The company has a contract with us and pays us to deliver.”
Isles explained that the only course of action a family member can take to stop junk mail is to let their regular mailman know that someone has died.
“The mailman will keep sending it back,” said Maria Nicolo, USPS postal worker in Scarsdale, NY, but there is always more to deliver.
On a snowy day in February, Efren Querijero, 57, is dressed in a full USPS snowsuit and trudges from house to house with a heavy mail bag slung over his right shoulder. “Most of the time,” said Querijero, “you know already someone passed away.”
Querijero, originally from the Philippines, has spent his last nine years as a postal worker, delivering mail to the same 300 families in Yonkers, NY. “It’s like my second family,” he said.
In another New York suburb, Kew Gardens, Queens, junk mail piles up in the front hallway of Peter Kaliski’s house.
Kaliski, 89, died on October 27th, 2020. His partner of 36 years, Ellen Streisand, is slowly getting used to the daily deluge of junk mail he still receives: AARP magazines, letters from T-Mobile, Oxfam, Hillel International, The ACLU, The Classical Network WWFM, The Queens Public Library Foundation, the list continues.
“It was bad enough to go through all the other things,” said Streisand. “Now to go through all that stuff with the post office…” Streisand already lost her partner. Now she has to face the arduous task of cancelling his mail.
Junk mail, or marketing mail, is an important source of revenue for the USPS. According to their Inspector General’s office, it generates $16.5 billion a year, which is almost a quarter of their total revenue. But not everyone benefits from the lucrative junk mail business.
“We don’t want to be sending out pieces of mail to dead people,” said Helene Raffaele, VP of Donor Strategy and Experience at UNICEF USA. She said that on top of ethical concerns, “It’s not cost effective.” Raffaele helped UNICEF USA establish a “Merge/Purge” team to ensure their mailing lists do not contain decedents.
Once a month, their data hygiene systems cross reference deceased information from the Social Security Administration to clean up their house file of donors. In February 2021, the scan removed 120,000 inactive files from a 11.8 million donor list. It is a small percentage of the people who have actually died.
Raffaele acknowledged the method isn’t perfect. “Every single day there is at least one comment saying, ‘This person is deceased, please take them off your mail list,’” said Raffaele.
One of the few options for survivors to stop the slew of junk mail their loved one receives is through the Direct Marketing Association (DMA)’s Deceased Do Not Contact List (DDNC).
The DDNC promises a decrease in junk mail, but only from members of the DMA. Angela Tyree, DMA consumer relations manager, said that it can take three months for a 70% decrease in junk mail.
For the USPS, they can’t do much to stop the mail deluge. “Every piece of mail gets delivered to a house,” said Richard Montesarchio, president of the Westchester, NY, chapter of the National Association of Letter Carriers. “That’s what the union believes in, that’s what I believe in, that’s what the postal service believes in.”
