We would be shocked if there’s anyone in the world who actually wants 17 pounds’ worth of glossy Restoration Hardware catalogs. Since the doorstops first began hitting doorsteps back in May, though, more catalog recipients who value the environment and the lower backs of delivery personnel have been speaking out.
We learned from the New Yorker that a tiny anti-Restoration Hardware revolt has been slowly spreading. Most people sighed and tossed them out, and some people just tweeted about it before sending the catalogs off for recycling, but other responses were truly inspired.
Our favorite protest had to be the one in Palo Alto, California, where volunteers collected 2,000 pounds’ worth of the catalogs from the nearby towns of Woodside and Portola Valley and stacked them in front of the company’s store in Palo Alto. “They’re counting on people having really busy lives and not really thinking about it,” local environmental activist and new Consumerist hero Nancy Reyering told Palo Alto Weekly.
The magazine describes their delivery from the scene: store employees hauled off stacks of catalogs as quickly as they could, asking the volunteers to please deliver them to the back loading dock. What, and defeat the entire point of the protest?
The catalogs were shipped via UPS. While Restoration Hardware boasted that it had purchased carbon offsets from UPS to make up for the miles driven to drop off the catalogs, it had failed to purchase back pain offsets and frustration offsets for employees stuck delivering the catalogs.
At least one nice thing came out of the catalog onslaight: people had a lot of fun finding ways to recycle the catalogs other than tossing them in the recycling bin, such as creating cat food stands and turning the glossy pages into pretty, glossy paper-bead jewelry.
Restoration Hardware’s Mail-Order Extravagance [New Yorker]
10 Alternate Uses for the 17 Pound Restoration Hardware Catalog [Old Town Home]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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