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Mailing mistake a shock to mom
© St. Petersburg Times You're in your house. Safe in suburbia. Winding down after a long day of working and raising children. In walks your 12-year-old son to show you his mail. It's junk mail. From a company called Warner Laboratories, peddling sexual stimulus pills. Spontane-ES, they call it, a sort of generic, non-prescription Viagra. Think Bob Dole. Again, your son is 12. And he's not a raised-on-the-streets 12. Yours is a conservative family. You watch what he reads. You monitor his television. His Internet use. His computer games, even. So what, now you have to open his mail? This is a real story, told to me by a schoolteacher who shall remain nameless here to protect her son's privacy. Not only did Junior get a stack of slick brochures, he also got two bright blue pills, shrink-wrapped and ready to go. I've met the son. He seems like a nice kid. While I haven't searched his bedroom, or his father's, I'm taking Mom's word that he has absolutely no idea how he got on this mailing list. So how did it happen? How often does it happen? Mom suspected the vendor had bought their name from Sports Illustrated, to which her son has a subscription. She reached that conclusion, in part, because someone had tried to sell them one of SI's swimsuit products. Furious, she called Warner's customer service number in Chesapeake, Va. The first time she called, she said they hung up on her. I called, left a message with president Jared Wheat, and heard back from him two weeks later. How did it happen? They're not entirely sure. Wheat says most of their mailing lists come from businesses with very adult customers, such as the Adam & Eve catalog. "When I go into lists that are more mainstream America, I age-select," Wheat said. He's looking for men over 35 or, in some cases, over 45. Something "might have fallen through the cracks" in the case of the Carrollwood preteen, he said. He doesn't "rent" (a direct marketing term) names from Sports Illustrated. Rick McCabe, a New York-based spokesman for the magazine, echoed that assertion. "We always exercise good taste and judgment when sharing subscriber info with a third party," he said. Credit card companies, they might trust. A sex products company? No way. As school wound down for spring break, my teacher friend was still investigating. Perhaps some other company or publishing house had her child's name. Being a teacher's kid, he does read a lot. Wheat assured me such slip-ups are extremely rare. "We have had, in the last six years, I think five such instances," Wheat said. "Maybe four. Maybe six. But I send out 3-million pieces of mail a month." I was pleasantly surprised that Wheat called me back. Sports Illustrated also was cooperative, though they were unable to answer a key question: What about all those independent subscription brokers on the Internet? How do you stop them from passing your name around? They're not supposed to, McCabe said. But there's no iron-clad guarantee. Both he and Wheat described a strict code of ethics that prohibits them from recycling these names more than once, or selling them to a fourth party. If you believe that, and you're not an Adam & Eve household, you're probably safe from those 3-million monthly dispatches. But you might want to watch the mail anyway.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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