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Yesterday, City Council member Simcha Felder held a press conference to announce legislation to ban menus, fliers and circulars from being distributed to homes and buildings. Introduction 427 would "make it illegal to distribute any unsolicited materials to households and buildings that display a sign indicating that they do not wish to receive them." Felder's statement said:
It doesn't matter what borough or what type of building you live in, if you live in New York City, you have been inundated with mounds of unwanted circulars and fliers. It's a waste, it's mess, and it's a threat to our quality of life. To top it off, these unwanted materials often result in Sanitation violations for home and building owners.The NY Times explains a little more about how this has hit home for Felder: Apparently Felder's mom was fined $100 by the DOS for not clearing up circulars et al. on her stoop. He said, "You shouldn’t be responsible for cleaning up someone else’s garbage."
Felder wants to fine flier-dropping folks $50. Do you think the fliers are a threat to your quality of life? Then again, sometimes delivery menus and the like do come in handy. We feel like many residents and buildings owners would love this legislation, while businesses will be unhappy. We'd like suggest a happy medium of building owners installing a plastic basket full of menus and other circulars so anyone who needs their umpteenth delivery menus can take them, but we're not sure that would ever work.
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As I was reading this, I was actually thinking that maybe we should just put up a bin for the menu and flier people to put them in. Clearly, great minds think alike.
notice the councilman who proposed this bill,
Felder and Gentile.
amen
cant stand these f*cking flyers
thouse of us who own 3-family homes for instance get swamped with this crap , and don't have "staff" to clean it up during the day..so i come home to garbage in front of my house..or better yet a sanitation ticket!!!
Lets keep the delivery guys from riding up and down the sidewalks first, then deal with the flyers.
Silly question: is there a loophole in the law allowing them to not get fined for littering, or is it just that the cops choose not to write those tickets?
I'm all for this, but I think the employers who send delivery people out with flyers should have to pay for violations, not the delivery people themselves, many of whom don't make $50 a day.
I think this is great. And the day that I put time and money into actually building something for more advertising to be shoved down my throat in my own home is the day I die.
the circulars are a complete waste of time & are always strewn in front of my building. yes, please, stop them!
Civil disobedience would come in handy with this problem. Whenever people get flyers they should call and place big delivery orders, and then refuse to accept delivery. If enough people get into the act the problem might go away.
I have a great idea! Why doesn't the councilman propose we have a mass recycling effort for all the unwanted circulars!
Oh, wait I forgot...Felder "hates" recycling.
Be my guest councilman,
Ban Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, Pathmark and Modell's.
Go right ahead ban the Penny Saver.
I hate the menus and circulars just as much as the next person, but I do feel obliged to point out that the reason why restaurants, etc. keep sending this crap out is that they at least perceive that it is helping their business. Same reason why spam and telemarketing continues unabated: it works. If Chase bank stopped getting responses to all those pre-approved credit card letters they send out, they would stop sending them out since it'd be unprofitable to do so.
The "beauty" of the free market is that if you set up an artificial barrier to business activity, like a rushing stream, it will find a way around the barrier and annoy you some other new way.
I'm just spouting this off the top of my head...can anyone else give a more educated/substantiated microeconomic analysis?
I don't think we can really stop people from dropping off fliers, because the restaurants just won't observe the law unless there is allready a ticketing system in place to prevent them from doing it. I think that it would be better to set up a system where the sanitation department is *required* to ticket the company indicated on fliers for littering, that would stop this from happening MUCH faster than simply making it illegal to drop flyers off in buildings. Of course, that wouldn't stop them from making delivery people drop flyers off *inside* apartment buildings when they make deliveries.
This is a good concept, but it'll never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever actually get enforced.
Hey eatery owners, you want an easy way to harm your competition? Just put litter your neighborhood with your competitor's flyers, and watch those fines eat away at their bottom line!
I think that the civil disobedience idea is the only real recourse. Organize your neighborhood to collect all fliers and stop by each restaurant en masses at 8:00 on a Thursday evening when the place is at its fullest and toss them on the floor.
Yeah, awesome. They're going to take this one right out of the asses of the delivery guys who will be told that they'll be fired if they don't leave them.
What about in Felder's own district where they love to pollute the streets with mammoth Posters on every darn lampost?
I would love something like this. More annoying than the actual litter? Some idiot delivery guy fucked up my building's elevator last week by hitting every single button on his way down. The elevator got stuck on the 9th floor, the computer running it got confused, and the entire building was reduced to 1 elevator for the 24 hours it took to have a repairman come in and fix everything.
Has anyone noticed tha mad sudden rush lately by felder to push odsball legistlation the last few weeks to keep his name in the headlines in anticipation of his intended run for city comptroller next year?
I don't want circulars—I own a house in Astoria—but also don't want to have to hang a sign on my stoop that says I don't want them. Why should I have to post an eyesore of a sign in front of my house? The circulars should just stop. Period. If you want to slip a menu into my mail slot, fine. But throwing bags of paper onto my stoop? Enough already.
not to mention, I've almost slipped on the plastic bags many times...I wonder if I can sue Pathmark?
oh calm down everyone. If you get this worked up about a few pieces of paper slipped under the door, how do you deal with every other aspect of life?
How hard is it to throw it out, or put it in a drawer that you can refer to if you ever want delivery?
I don't mind the flyers down in the lobby but in the evenings the delivery guys will jam them into my apt door and make my dog go insane. And its always the same restaurants. Sometimes they do come in handy, I agree. Oh, and a bin would only work for so long.
I guess Councilman Felder never heard of the First Amendment (Freedom of the Press)
Does this ban include menus from kosher restaurants in flatbush? uncle country magazine?
who uses paper menus anymore? everyone i know uses seamlessweb.com and menupages for delivery food
Can we stop the silly oorah cd's too?
What about the cucumber magnets?
It is very annoying to come home after a week away and see a stack of those d@mn menu fliers in front of my apartment door.
It just informs everyone that the occupant isn't there and that the apartment is ripe for burglary.
#12 wrote:
The "beauty" of the free market is that if you set up an artificial barrier to business activity, like a rushing stream, it will find a way around the barrier and annoy you some other new way.
I'm just spouting this off the top of my head...can anyone else give a more educated/substantiated microeconomic analysis?
***
The more substantial microeconomic analysis is that flyering causes a negative externality - businesses profit from flyering, but in doing so cause homeowners to have to pay fines and create a general garbage nuisance.
If businesses paid all the homeowner fines and also reimbursed everyone enough to make them not care about having to look at tons of garbage on the street, and if they then still turned a profit, then flyering would be economically efficient.
If felder cared about the quality of life then he should push the shyster landlords to get their supers to claen the hallways more than once a month. isnt there a law about keeping the buildings clean?
It's not just menus. Our building is the preferred dumping ground for circulars, shitty free newspapers, copies of the NY Times that some former tenant forgot to cancel, etc. We have no full-time doorman, so we're welcomed by piles of paper crap almost every night when returning home from work. Attaching a basket outside is a STUPID idea. So is putting a "no circular" sign that these non-english speaking delivery people will ignore or fail to comprehend.
I am a single family homeowner in Brooklyn and I don't care who Felder is or what he stands for, I have been fed up for years over this issue. I firmly beleive in conservation and saving this planet for my children. I would have almost no recyle garbage w/o the HUGE mess of flliers/menus/newspapers etc that are left on my stoop on a daily basis. As a TAX PAYING homeowner I am powerless as to who comes onto my property dropping garbage. Say what you like about Felder, garbage all over my lawn and stoop that I have no part in creating destroys the quality of life! NYer's deserve a choice!
I own a home in Queens and have been "waging a war" with the flyer morons for years. (Tip: They don't like it when you fling the crap back into the van) I found a website today that offers relief. http://www.lawnlitter.com
I signed up my home and they're going to send me a sign that works with the law. Yippee!!