Even YOU can get mail in West Hollywood

Don't you hate it when you're jetting among your houses in Malibu, Aspen, Paris and Timbuktu and you just can't keep up with your snail mail? After all, you don't want the butler to open that letter from the agency trying to find you a new butler.

Earth Class Mail wants to manage your mail for you. Just have it sent to one of the addresses the Seattle company provides, and it will put electronic scans of the mail you receive online. Then you log on and see what mail you've gotten, and you can ask them to open it or send it to you (or shred it, as the case may be).

Today, Earth Class Mail opens a store in West Hollywood. That means all you jet-setters and jet-setter wannabes can have your mail sent to 8605 Santa Monica Blvd., and Earth Class Mail will do its job. Non-jet-setters and people who want to avoid the post office can also use the store to send and shred mail.

West Hollywood is the first of three "prestige addresses" being launched by Earth Class Mail to ensure that the mail-challenged don't lose face by having their mail sent to Oregon, the location of the company's largest facility, or another rather unglamorous destination. Soon, the company will launch ...

... addresses on Market Street in San Francisco and Park Avenue in New York. The prestige addresses will set you back an extra $20 a month for L.A. or S.F. and $25 for New York, on top of the regular Earth Class Mail fees ($10 to $70 a month, depending on your service). But what's 20 bucks when you don't have to worry that your servants are signing up for those free platinum card offers you keep receiving?

"People are willing to pay an extra charge for a premium address," ECM Chief Executive Ron Wiener said. That's especially true of actors who perhaps live in Kansas but don't want to be passed over for a WeHo casting call, he said, or CEOs running companies out of their parents' basement in New Jersey who want to pretend they're actually located on Park Avenue.

With 200 billion pieces of mail sent a year, snail mail isn't going anywhere, Wiener said. And P.O. boxes are kind of passe because no one wants to come back from Timbuktu early just to make sure his or her's isn't getting filled up or leave their "Sopranos" marathon to drive down to the post office.

You never know. The cachet of West Hollywood could kick off that screenwriting career -- anyone whose address is in the heart of WeHo must be Someone. Someone too important to open their own mail.

-- Alana Semuels

Photo by Kent Barrett via Flickr

Comments

[Mark]

I use this service and love it. I started with the less than glamorous Beaverton, Oregon address. I imagine large, furry, coffee drinking dam builders sorting my mail.

For that reason I recently started using the Seattle address. And since we just recently moved to Seattle their new "pick-up" feature is nice for when urgent or large package mail arrives.

I'm vainly trying to get 100% of my non-magazine and personal correspondence mail to go to my ECM address. Sometimes it feels like trying to dam a river with a handful of toothpicks. But I love recycling all the junk mail crap.

Pretty nice.