One Million AOL discs to be returned to AOL

nicedream writes "Two guys from California are trying to give AOL a taste of its own medicine. They're asking people to send them AOL discs, and they're going to drop them off at the company's doorstep once they collect 1 million discs. My favorite quote: "We're going to AOL and say, 'You've got mail"." seems like a better taste would be to dial out and use all 1000 free hours. A million people do *that* and I bet they'd stop filling our mailboxes with the landfill of tomorrow.

Comments

What a thoughtless waste...

[stienman]

Look, they are asking 1 million people to spend upwards of 40 cents each to send a useless CD to them, then they are going to spend how much to deliver the truckload to AOL?

Think about it, that's at least $400,000 dollars down the drain! Why not ask people to contribute $0.40 towards infrastructure costs in their area for public 802.11b hotspots. Tell them to mark any and all AOL mail "RETURN TO SENDER" and AOL will bear even greater costs, at no cost to the consumer.

Egad, people, use your brains.

Besides, AOL is going down the toilet anyway. Their shiny discs aren't going to be very useful to them after a few years as dialup dwindles, especially since broadband doesn't net them nearly as much profit as dialup once did. They're going to change their business model significantly over the next few years - it'll be interesting.

But seriously, put your effort into providing free net access for everyone.

-Adam

Re:AOL's ad campaigns save you money

[_ph1ux_]

Thats BS.

Mail was never much more expensive *before* AOL CDs started soming in. If anything it causes more overhead. An increase in volume through the mail system with mail that very vey few people would actually want.

There would be less overhead if AOL would stop sending out so many CDs. The post office would have that much less to worry about.

You know what I do everytime I go to the mailbox and there is spam mail in my slot - I stick it in the Outgoing mail slot.

One time I walked up to the mailbox when the mailman was busy stuffing it full of crap. I asked him if he would please just not put that stuff in my mail box. He said that there is only one way for him to stop putting such mail that is addressed to "So & So OR Current Resident" and other spammings such as the coupon newspapers and pizza offers - get a P.O. Box.

PMBs are apparently the only thing where there is regulation limiting the unsolicited mailings that are allowed.

Re:AOL's ad campaigns save you money

[suss]

Yeah... you wouldn't want to pay a few cents more for your mail to get rid of all this garbage.
After all, there's probably a spot somewhere that isnt a landfill yet.

How long does it take for a cd to dissolve anyway?

"one million" is a big number.

[NFW]

If they want to get this done in ten years, they will need to collect over 270 CDs per day, every day, for the next ten years. AOL may send out far more than that, but they will have a hard time getting that many people to play this game.

I'll wager AOL gives up the CD campaign before they reach their mark, leaving these guys with a really big pile of CDs, and no campaign to protest.

Don't get me wrong, I do think it's a neat idea, I just think they set their sights a couple orders of magnitude higher than is practical.

Bizarre packaging

[fanatic]

I got my latest AOL coaster (CD) yesterday. It acually came in a metal container. Think of the tins that mints (such as penguin mints or Altoids) come in, but CD sized. I'm not an AOL user. Never have been. Why would they use such a wasteful container? It had to cost 3 times what the CD did - probably more.