Male Call

I've got another little banner for the bottom of my page:

Who would have thought that of all people to be upset about lingerie that it would be forestry conservationists? Click the banner, it'll show you what's up.

I have a friend who's father is a business school professor at the University of Chicago (or at least that's my recollection, it's a little fuzzy). The friend told me her dad thought that Victoria's Secret had the most aggressive direct marketing program in existence. This would have been close to 15 years ago, but at the time, Victoria's typically mailed 54 catalogs a year to people on their mailing list.

That's a lot of catalogs. From the Forest Ethics people's page:

What You Should Know About Victoria's Dirty Secret:

• Approximately 395 million catalogs are mailed by Victoria's Secret each year - that's more than one million a day.
• Most catalogs end up in the trash or recycling - often without even being looked at.
• Almost all of these catalogs are produced from virgin fiber paper with little or no recycled content.
• Paper for these catalogs is destroying endangered forests like the great northern Boreal forest of Canada.
• Victoria's Secret is not satisfied with just stripping the Boreal, it is also destroying forests in the Southern U.S. The Southern US is one of the most biologically diverse regions of our country where nearly 6 million acres of forest are logged each year, primarily for the production of paper.
• Indigenous people are being negatively impacted by the logging and paper production industries.
• Native plant and animal populations are being destroyed by logging and processing operations and the pollution they create.
• Because of its immense buying power, Victoria's Secret is in the position to help change the catalog industry toward sustainable paper purchasing.
• The company has refused to make commitments to protect our Endangered Forests.

Now some of this sounds like what I am sure Rush would call the sounds of environmentalist wackos, but I can tell you as someone that used to be on this mailing list, you do get a lot of glossy porn over the course of the year.

I think that a reduction of the number of catalogs they send out wouldn't be a bad thing. Like the site says, most of them do go straight to the trash. Sometimes the next one comes before you even have a chance to look at the last one. I for one was real happy when I moved and somehow got dropped from their distribution.

Anyway, another decent cause - besides, Vickie's stuff hasn't really been all that impressive of late anyway, has it?