Stop Spamming me with Corporate Birthday Cards

It is the time of year when my birthday is fast approaching and that means that I am receiving a few birthday cards, sometimes from parties from which I would not expect one. Some of these parties are not people, but corporations who happen to have my birth date on file for one reason or another.

In any other context, snail mail sent from a corporation to one's home mailbox for marketing purposes would be called junk mail or spam. Sunglasses Hut, et al. try and disguise the purpose of the letter (making you want to buy more of their products) by making the implication that they're corresponding out of consideration for you by politely remembering the celebration of your birth. Now, some may think that this is a genuine gesture of kindness, but I disagree. The entire point of a card is to remind someone that you are thinking about him or her and his/her particular situation. I find nothing personal or redeeming about being the recipient of a letter sent by a cron job at HQ once a year which was ordered by a marketing director that neither knows me nor has any reason to care about my circumstance save trying to extract more of my hard-earned cash out of my pocket.

In fairness I must note that, unlike most every other sender of birthday spam, Sunglasses Hut at least sent me a twenty-dollar gift certificate to their store. Considering that I don't need another pair of sunglasses and would hesitate to buy from SH again given this annoying practice, I find it small recompense for wasting my time and mailbox space with their spam.

I guess this can just be chalked up to another consequence of an age when more private parties are holding our personal data and are ever eager to exploit it for their own ends. It seems as there is no disincentive for corporations to send all the spam they want, I'll be receiving quite a few more cards from well-wishing chief marketing officers in the future.

bigshotcmo@sunglasseshut27:~$ crontab -l
# m h  dom mon dow   command
  0 0  1   *   *     ./send_birthday_cards_for_month

...

db.execute("SELECT * FROM customer WHERE MONTH(birthday) = MONTH(NOW())).each do |customer|
    Notifier.send_individual_card(customer)
end

...

Dear $customer.first_name,

Happy birthday!  You are super special to us!  Spend more money at our store!  
Thanks for providing us with your birthday!  Thanks to our expert DBAs and 
comprehensive database backup policy, we're able to retrieve your personal 
information on demand and sure to never expunge your data from our records.  
Have a nice day!

Love,

Moneybags
CMO