Mailing Labels - A Cautionary Tale

Unsurprisingly, I have run out of return address labels. The ones I'd been using were a set of Ziggy labels I received four years ago when I gave some money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The others were a set of beach scenes that I again got for "free" when I donated to St. Jude's. They have my name annoyingly spelled with a lower case q. Mcqueen is just not the same as McQueen, is it?

It was a bit of a shock when I placed the last ugly beach scene label on an envelope recently. Apparently, the organizations to whom I've been doing my charitable giving stopped offering this service, and I hadn't been paying attention.

I had no choice but to resort to ordering and purchasing return address labels - something I hadn't done in over 20 years.

Back in the day, you'd find ads for these things in coupon mailers and the Lillian Vernon catalogs that my mom received. It was a quick and simple process, with few choices and almost no shipping fees.

Now, of course, there are approximately 5,500,000 companies from whom you can order return address labels over the internet. Just click on, say, the first company in the lineup and you'll find yourself with 8,185 design choices.

A word of advice: don't (as I did) spend two hours late on a Friday night perusing most of the 8,185 designs, only to have your wi-fi bog just when you've made a decision. Wait until morning. Pick something from the first page. IT'S AN ADDRESS LABEL - not a tattoo that will mark you till the end of days. Give yourself ten seconds, pick, click, and don't balk at the $4.50 shipping fee, even though the labels only cost $1.99.

Sigh. Who knew it was possible to miss Lillian Vernon catalogs?