All right.

Let's see what we got here.

That's me partaking in a great American ritual, a daily trip to the mailbox.

At least, it used to be a great ritual.

All right.

I have what looks like a bill here, but it's just a car insurance offer.

We have some coupons, smart and final, Safeway DoorDash.

I have a credit card offer here.

And this one's printed to look like it's handwritten on a piece of binder paper,

but it's just a guy trying to replace my windows.

This stuff, the people who send it call it direct mail.

Those of us who receive it call it junk mail.

And my mailbox isn't the only one stuffed with it.

By one estimate, the average American receives around 41 pounds of junk mail each year.

In an age of digital ads and email inboxes, you may wonder why we still get

bombarded with paper advertisements that most of the time go straight into the recycling bin.

Well, for starters, it works.

The faux checks, maybe the official envelope that looks like it's a tax document.

They're very inexpensive, and those work really, really well.

But there's another reason.

The Postal Service has an interest in delivering us as much junk mail as possible.

The direct mail industry, one of the things they like to say is that they basically pay the

...