Hey, Comcast customers: The company is wasting your money!

More than 15 years ago, my wife and I had a small company operated out of a post office box in our tiny little town in Puget Sound. As you might expect, the direct-mail marketers got wind of our existence and sent us all kinds of "exciting offers."

Before long, our company went out of existence, but you'd never know it to look at the mail we get. There are a few stalwart mega-corporations that haven't given up hope that our long-defunct business will someday, somehow buy something from them. And one of the most persistent is your friendly local cable company.

Just the other day, in fact, Comcast sent us a "business savings voucher." The terms of the offer aren't important; what's remarkable is that they are still chasing a company that hasn't sold a product, sent an email, run a website, run an ad, renewed a business license, or done anything in 15 years!

Now, direct mail as practiced by big companies is a pretty exact science. If you do it right, you spend your money on things that are likely to result in sales. You avoid things that have a low probability of success—including, I would argue, mailing to "prospects" that haven't been heard from in a decade and a half and aren't listed in any directory. By any reasonable standard, this qualifies as scraping the bottom of the barrel. Any savvy marketer regularly "cleans" their mailing list of obsolete or defunct entries.

The logical conclusion is that whoever runs Comcast's direct-mail operation is stupid or incompetent. Either that, or the company has so much money that it isn't troubled by wasting it chasing ghosts. Whichever, Comcast's customers are paying for this egregious waste, and they shouldn't be happy about it.

Now, about those credit cards that Chase is constantly offering our defunct company…