Dear LPG,

In the words of Max Bygraves  ‘I want to tell you a story’…

It was quite late on a cold winter’s night and I was writing a letter when I heard the clap of the letterbox at my front door.  The postman had already been a lot earlier in the day and I was not expecting anyone else, but I was distracted and so got up and found a leaflet on my front door mat. 

My first thought was the same as that of many others I suspect.  “OK, here we go again; another load of rubbish’.  I picked it up and didn’t even look to see what it was about before putting it in the bin, but then it occurred to me that the glossy bit of paper that I had disposed of was the product of quite a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

There are the people that design them (who, I suspect, do very nicely), the people who paid to have them produced in the first place (at quite a cost), then there is the person who did the leg-work just so that we can be enlightened, or reminded about, the local Indian or Chinese take away, a house cleaning service, the ideas of a political party, what the local council have to say, an invitation to participate in a survey or a local gardening service. 

So, I now react a little differently, and spare a thought for all those people, as I bend to pick one of these flyers up, although I then am just as likely to bin the paperwork before I continue to do whatever it was that I was on my way to do before the visual interruption.

RB, Grove Park.

LPG took a look at this and found that RB has a point.  We learned via the Internet that leafleting can be a costly business. 

There are always the government organisations and larger companies who’s leaflet budget is large, but consider the small companies or sole traders who are just getting started and trying to let the locals know that they are out there.   

Did you know that typically it could cost anything from £30 to have 100o relatively cheap leaflets designed and produced?  We found out that the royal mail will deliver 8000 if you pay them £500.  The person who delivers them is likely to receive £25.00 for delivering 1000 and, on average, they will manage to deliver about 60 per hour.   From those figures we worked out that these people (many of which are students, although there are also a lot of older people, walking around our streets at all times of the day and night, and in all weathers), get paid about £1.50 for each hour’s walking they do. 

And the saddest statistic of all is that it is accepted that for each 100 leaflets delivered less than five are likely to inspire any of the people that pick them up from the front door mat to respond.

We often recognise the big company’s logos when they arrive through the door, and to add to those statistics, we need to be mindful that while many other leaflets and flyers that are delivered door-to-door are the attempts of genuine aspiring entrepreneurs and small companies who are doing their best to let the people they are leafleting know that they exist and have a service to offer, they are all mixed up with those that arrive from con men that we have to remember to be very wary of. 

It is a true leaflet lottery for all involved.

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