Ban Sticker Advertisements on Cars
Undoubtedly if you’ve walked around the East Side of Milwaukee for an extended period of time you’ve encountered a “Part Time Cash” sticker on the window of a car, or laying next to the curb. And therein lies the problem.
The soon-to-be-litter ad on a car window on the East Side.
The stickers are littered about cars on an almost weekly basis in the summer, promising the opportunity to earn up to $1,500 in 10-15 hours a week of work. The advertisement that certainly fails the “if it’s too good to be true, it must be” test. With the promise of “flexible hours” on the ad, one can only assume the part-time job is placing the stickers on more cars.
But it’s not the near-Pyramid scheme feel that is the problem with the sticker advertisements, it’s how they quickly become litter. The stickers can be found laying in gutters all across the East Side and East Town, one can only imagine that they’ve spread to other neighborhoods as well including Bay View. The litter problem doesn’t seem to be created by people tossing the stickers on the ground either, they fall off regularly (add to that policies like the recently passed 5-day parking ordinance encouraging people not to use their car everyday).
It would be wise for the Milwaukee Common Council to enact an ordinance banning advertisements from being placed on parked cars. Not because the ads themselves are the problem, but because the litter generated by the ads is completely unnecessary.
Honorable mention for “worst offender at carpeting cars and ultimately the street with ads” goes to The Rave and their drink tickets, however, they do it far less frequently.
i purposely through these papers on the ground. i like to think that if enough garbage is found on the street that others will rise to action. i have called this number and tried to leave messages to not distribute the stickers near my address. this did not work. one morning i ran into the the teenager clad in oversized headphones, hoodie, and fistfulls of the post-it stickers. i asked him not to put the sticker on my car. he asked which one was mine, obviously upset that i was bothering him. i pointed to the direction he came from. after that he shrugged his shoulders and remounted his headphones. good luck ridding us of this problem. hopefully the job losses won’t be blamed on wall street, rather any residential street in milwaukee.
Might I add another issue with these “post-it” type ads. I had one stuck to my car window and before I realized it and started rolling my window down, the “post-it” went down with my window and then got stuck hanging half way out. Of course at this point, my efforts to pull it off only made it worse because
the top portion came off and the bottom stayed stuck in my window/door.
I was so furious and didn’t even know who’s ad it was to call and complain.
BTW- it’s still in there.
Hi Jeramey,
Yeah, I’m not a fan of these particular stickies, and I get your point about the litter issue. On the one hand, I would be glad to not have to deal with them, but on the other hand- as someone who sometimes feels inclined to reach out to the people around me- I somewhat like the “advertisement on car” method. Sure, I could send mail to my neighbors- but that would only cover my neighbors. What about the people from outside of my neighborhood who come to visit? Maybe I would like to target them, too.
I don’t know. Hard to say if that one use-case justifies the annoyance factor. If nothing else, it might be nice to ban the “sticky note” version of these ads, since, like you said, the glue fails and turns them into litter.
-Tim