Ads in the Mail

Over the last several months and in fact since moving in to my new apartment, I've been impressed by the various advertisements that always seem to fill the mailbox. The interesting thing to me is that I keep receiving the same fliers over and over again. My roommate and I have derived some entertainment from this, as we don't plan on making use of many of these resources. We continue to receive ads for TV hookup from Directv and Dish, two dominating names in the satellite service they provide. They each seem to be competing for customers and hope to reach potential clients through this reinforcement through a frequent use of fliers advertising their low rates and sign-on bonuses. While this may all be expected, it is somewhat interesting to us how we ended up on JC Penney's mailing list.

Granted, we enjoy looking at the catalogs but realize we don't have the disposable income to make such purchases. We've concluded that the previous tenant must have favored the department store and thus received such promotions. This is JC Penney's way of building value through customers and accessing which customers continue to give them business and those which gradually fade-off. I'm sure that one day they will cease sending these catalogs if we fail to give them business (and "be fired" as the textbook calls it) but until that time, we'll enjoy looking through Penney's offerings and imagine what we could buy.

This reminds me of when I was growing up, I received a Lionel Electric Train catalog of latest offerings through a local model train shop which my family had given business. For a number of years, we would pre-order Lionel items (which was great in my mind, lots of cool new model train stuff!) and buy Lionel items at the store. However, the rate at which we were putting money into this hobby was not sustainable and I grew up realizing that I had to save my money and not spend it all. To my dismay, after a while I no longer received that Lionel catalog in the mail with all the latest and greatest model train items. I suppose that saved me some money in the long run even though the train shop decided I was a customer no longer giving them the sales they needed.