Oct. 29, 2003
The Problem with Envelope Stuffing Programs
Back in the days when I was young and foolish I came across an ad in a mail order publication that was looking for people to stuff envelopes. They promised to pay people something like fifty cents or a dollar for each envelope they stuffed.
"This sounds great!", I thought. "I could easily stuff 60 envelopes an hour. That would mean I could make at between 30 and 60 dollars an hour! Wow!"
Let’s think about this for a minute. Why would someone pay you fifty cents or more to stuff an envelope when they can hire someone for minimum wage to do it? Hmmm, could this be too good to be true?
Well, they’re not going to send you the envelopes for free. First, you have to pay some type of registration fee. I don’t remember, but I think I had to buy the stamps, maybe even my own envelopes!
I was a little disappointed when I got my package. What I was suppose to do was to send an ad out to a number of people. The ad was for envelope stuffing! It was the same ad that I answered in the mail order publication! Whenever someone would answer one of those ads the person that sent the ad out got the fifty cents or one dollar that they were promised. I remember paying a registration fee, and I’m sure everyone that signs up pays one as well. The person who does all the work, however, receives only fifty cents or a dollar. Who gets the rest?
One of the things that they forget to tell you is that you’ll receive a low response rate. I bought into a scheme that promised me a one to two percent response rate. After sending out 500 letters, I received nothing.
Lets Do Some Math
I don’t remember how many letters I got at first, or if I had to buy any stamps or envelopes myself, but as you’ll soon see, it doesn’t really matter what you get. So lets say you can stuff 50 envelopes an hour. Let’s also say that the company provides you enough product that you can stuff envelopes for eight hours a day! There is no way that could ever happen, but let’s have some fun here.
50 envelopes an hour x 8 hours a day x 5 days a week equals 2,000 envelopes a week.
If you’re lucky, you might get one-tenth percent response rate. Maybe you would get more, perhaps I was just unlucky? Let’s say then that you’ll get a one-half percent response.
Being the super envelope stuffer that you are, you send out 2,000 envelopes and receive a response of:
2,000 x 0.5% equals 10.
Yeaaa! After spending 40 hours, stuffing 2,000 envelopes, you made ten dollars!!
Let’s hope in the above example, a person doesn’t have to buy their own stamps. Otherwise, in addition to spending all that time, you would have spent over $700 as well!!
One of the problems here, among many, is that people are not told up front what it is exactly that they are expected to do.
O.K., mine came with a money back guarantee, so I’ll just get my money back!
I don’t remember the details exactly, but in order to get my money back I had to send out all of the letters and prove that I didn’t get a response. You know what that means, don’t you? Say good bye to your registration fee.
If the registration fee was $20.00, and you got a dollar for each ad responded to, that means the nice people who gave you this “job” got to keep $190.00 for themselves. If the registration fee was $30.00 and you only got fifty cents for each response, you’ll get five dollars, while they’ll get $290.00.
Of course, the possibility of you achieving those number in such a short time are very slim, but I think you get the idea. I’m sure you can find something better to do with your money than to give it away to some envelope stuffing program.
