Customer Street Improvements

At Customer Street I get all sorts of Google Alerts and this morning I was notified about a posting at thedailydairy.com which highlights a useful new product. Following the route of this post I got to Luke Anderson at ohgizmo.com who says:

When you were a kid, did your parents ever use a giant phone book as a booster seat? If you lived somewhere like New York, there’s a good chance that a single set of yellow pages was enough to help you reach the table. Of course if you’re from a small town like me, you were better off finding a large dictionary, as it took several phone books to do any good.

It just shows what people are really using their print directories for! If you have a suggestion for how to use Yellow Pages, Phonebooks or Thomson Directories drop me a mail.

Buy the booster seat here

Last week I arrived home from CustomerStreet.com to my apartment block to find that we had had a delivery of about 10 kilos of printed and bound paper in plastic wrappers. This huge block of yellow wrapped ink and paper will sit in our hallway for the next six months until the the slightly smaller block of blue wrapped paper and plastic arrives and the the yellow pile is thrown out. In my town you can see this doorstop directories littering the streets.

It struck me that the printed directories whilst trying to minimise their environmental impact still must have a massive impact. The energy involved in producing the paper, printing, glueing, wrapping and distributing their product must be immense. Crunchy Domestic Goddess in her blog recognises the environmental impact printed directories and the fact that on-line directories are readily available on-line.

Stop Yellow - I couldn’t find any information on the Yellow Pages web site about stopping getting copies of their printed directory. In desperation I rang their order line on 0800 671 444 and they took my details to stop delivery. Interestingly this number can also be used to find our where you can take your old directory for recycling.