We Shouldn’t Know Your Mailbox Number

What the mailroom reveals about the culture of consumption on campus.

Scenes from the CMC mailroom

“Has Amazon come yet?” 

This is the first thing we ask when we come into the mailroom to start a shift. There is a lot to love about the job—our bosses Shannon, Tati, and Peter, great coworkers, chatting with students, and occasionally getting a live unboxing of a care package from home. But every mailroom worker knows the dread that follows the sound of wheels coming down the hallway—the signal that the delivery driver has arrived, towing carts stacked high with brown boxes and blue-and-white plastic.

In the last week of October, the mailroom received 1,888 packages. In the month of September, we sorted 6,125 packages into the lockers. This isn’t including letter mail, perishable items, or boxes that are sorted behind the counter. We have been on shifts where we have received over 300 packages in one hour. We won’t, but we could, recite memorized names and box numbers of our most frequent orderers. A shocking number of students receive packages daily or even multiple times a day. Consumerism is not a problem unique to CMC, or even to college campuses, but talk to our local delivery drivers—and we have—and they’ll tell you that we order more than nearby colleges with over ten times our student population. 

The purpose of this article isn’t to shame anyone for their spending habits, nor to complain about having to do our job: it’s to acknowledge the broader issue of consumerism that has quietly taken over our campus, and to consider what that says about us. Because while those of us who work in the mailroom joke about it, consumerism at CMC is a problem. 

Online shopping has become a pastime. With the advent of Amazon, targeted Instagram ads, and TikTok Shop (the list goes on), buying has never been easier. Purchases happen with a few easy clicks and deliver a dopamine rush. When packages arrive after two whole days (courtesy of Jeff Bezos), much of the time the customer doesn’t even remember what they ordered. Some boxes sit unclaimed for days or weeks, forcing us to pull them from the lockers despite countless reminder emails. The thrill of an impulsive purchase fades, but the waste persists. 

Even if the two of us didn’t avidly read Bardia’s (the Vice President of Student Activities) event informs, we still would know when there is a big party coming up. As Monte Carlo neared, we received an influx of packages—from Shein, Princess Polly, and Revolve—each wrapped in multiple layers of plastic and containing outfits that will likely be worn just once. Many CMCers purchase multiple sizes, styles, and colors with the intent of keeping their favorite and returning the rest, only to have them sit untouched for the rest of the semester. A themed event means a corresponding outfit, and this seems to give us permission to fulfill our deep-set desires to acquire something new. 

And it isn’t just event-shopping. “One-click” order culture has bled into every part of our routines. Instead of asking a friend to borrow something, driving five minutes to Target, or walking to the convenience store down the street, we press a button and it magically appears. 

Maybe the real question isn’t how much we consume, but why we consume to excess. The mailroom tells us something not just about our habits, but about our culture. It’s a culture of convenience and instant gratification—of “I want it now” and “I can afford not to think about why.” There is a privilege in this, the kind we are rarely willing to acknowledge. Being able to impulse-order a new outfit, or replace a phone charger that you definitely already have somewhere but have misplaced, is a luxury. And that luxury depends on invisible labor.

Every box passes through dozens of hands before it reaches us, and when it finally does, we get annoyed at how long it takes for it to be sorted into a locker. Some even go so far as to lie, claiming that their non-urgent package is medication, so that we prioritize getting it to them faster (yes, this does actually happen). In the mailroom, we are constantly surrounded by the physical evidence of consumption, and it’s impossible not to see how individual convenience turns into collective excess. 

None of this is to say that we, the authors of this article, are perfect exceptions. Our Amazon carts are often full of items we definitely don’t need, and, at the very least, the two of us rely on the convenience of the mailroom for our monthly order of Nespresso pods. The problem isn’t ignorance. Most of us acknowledge that fast fashion is wasteful and that plastic packaging is terrible for the planet. But knowing better rarely motivates change. The system is designed to make consumption feel frictionless. And we’ve decided to tell ourselves that it’s “not that bad” because we checked Depop first, or because we didn’t have time to go to the store.

Behind every “harmless” order, every new clothing item we don’t need, every time we order new notebooks or detergent instead of walking to the Huntley Bookstore to buy some, there’s a system being fed and feeding us in return. So while we laugh when we go to the mailroom and four lockers pop open at the scanning of our QR code, we are consuming without thinking, and it shows. 

Next time the Amazon driver makes a delivery, we hope it’s a bit lighter. Not just because we want a slower shift, but because we’ve all decided to slow down a bit ourselves and to resist a system that turns every whim into waste. Ask yourself: Do I need this? Could I borrow it? Could I go buy it locally and talk to a real human being in the process? Could I go without it? A little less clicking. A little more thinking. And if not for the environment, or your wallet, then maybe for the mailroom workers who know your box number by heart.