How to Stop Catalogs in the Mail (and Why They Keep Coming Back)

Catalogs are the bulkiest, most stubborn junk mail in the box. They arrive from companies you bought from once and companies you never bought from at all, and they pile up faster than anything else. Recycling them is easy (though many actually still end up in landfills). Making them stop is the part that defeats people, because each catalog sits on a different list, and your address is on many lists at once.

The shortest path is to hand the work to a service that contacts any sender for you.

The do-it-yourself routes below all work too. They just put the labor and the follow-up on you, one sender at a time. Worth knowing either way, so you can see exactly what each route reaches.

Contact each sender directly

This is the route that works on any catalog. Use the phone number, web form, or email printed on the piece. Give your exact name and address, quote the customer number if there is one, and ask to be both removed and not shared or sold. It is the most reliable per-sender method, and it is one sender at a time, repeated as the lists rebuild.

Catalog Choice

A free service that forwards your opt-out to participating merchants. It can meaningfully cut volume. Its limit is built in, and it is worth understanding before you lean on it, so it has its own note below.

DMAchoice

Run by the Association of National Advertisers, it lets you opt out of the catalog category at member companies for a fee the FTC lists at about eight dollars for ten years. Useful for the big national mailers. Here is the part worth knowing before you pay:

Here is the part almost no guide explains, and it is why a removal can feel like it vanished.

When you ask a catalog to remove you, the company has to find you in its database. The number it prints near your address, the customer number, is how it does that. Quote it with your exact name and address and the request lands on the right record. Skip it, or have your name slightly misspelled in their system, and the request can fail to match anything.

There is a deeper signal in that number. Real digits mean you are in the cataloger’s own house file, with an account they can suppress. A number that is all zeros means you are not in their file at all. Your address was rented from someone else’s list for a one-time mailing, and there is no record of you to delete. Asking that company again does little, because the address never came from them.

For a while it really did look finished. Catalog mailings peaked at roughly 19.6 billion pieces in 2007, then a steep postal-rate increase and the recession gutted the economics. By 2016 the number had fallen to about 9.8 billion, half the peak. Victoria’s Secret, which had mailed hundreds of millions of catalogs a year at a cost approaching 150 million dollars, killed its catalog that same year and called the format stale. The obituaries wrote themselves.

Then the catalog came back, and the brands reviving it were the ones you would least expect.

By 2018, mailings had climbed back to an estimated 11.5 billion, and the engine was the internet brands. Amazon began mailing a holiday toy book styled after the old Sears Wish Book. Wayfair, Bonobos, and Everlane, all born online, started sending paper. Restoration Hardware went the other direction entirely, mailing source books so heavy that one widely covered edition ran past 600 pages and weighed about 15 pounds, with the company booking tens of millions of dollars in catalog costs in a single year.

The logic is the same for all of them. Digital ads are crowded and easy to swipe past; a catalog sits on a coffee table for days and gets handled. Catalogs drive online and in-store visits rather than competing with them, and the audience skews younger than people assume. The USPS Inspector General has found that millennials are more likely than older shoppers to visit a store after getting mail. A good catalog is advertising you operate, an object people choose to spend time inside.

It is easy to be glib about catalogs because so many of them are landfill in waiting, printed by the billion and aimed by data brokers at whoever is most likely to buy. Most of what fills your mailbox is exactly that, and stopping it is the entire point of this guide.

But the catalog was once something larger, and it is worth being honest about what the format meant before we cheer its decline.

The Sears catalog was the consumer internet of its era, a single book from which rural America could order clothes, tools, toys, a sewing machine, a guitar, even an entire house shipped as a numbered kit by railcar. Children spent the holidays circling toys in the Wish Book. For households far from any real store, the catalog was not junk mail. It was the store, the selection, and the fair price all at once.

Catalogs were also, at their best, real craft. The J. Peterman book turned product copy into short fiction. Patagonia ran photo essays and environmental arguments between the fleece jackets. IKEA’s annual volume took the better part of a year to make.

The point was never that catalogs are evil. The point is that you should decide which ones reach you, instead of a chain of data brokers deciding for you.

That is the whole idea behind PaperKarma. Keep the two or three catalogs you actually want. Photograph the rest, and we get you off those lists across every sender, customer numbers and all, and keep you off as new ones surface. The difference between a request that vanishes and a mailbox that stays quiet is doing it everywhere, every time, which is exactly the part worth handing off.