Never a customer, the ULINE catalog for me was simply a coffee-table mainstay.

I looked to the catalog whenever an appetite struck for the type of print window-shopping that has become scarce since the fall of SkyMall in 2015.

In the modern age of advertising, where sophisticated algorithms serve a custom ad for toothpaste at the exact moment we finish the tube, the inside-back cover of a Wisconsin-based 600-page cardboard-box catalog is likely a low-value platform for influence.

Nevertheless, Liz Uihlein (co-founder, president - ULINE) is convinced she’s found the perfect soapbox to describe the world the way she would like to see it, in her “Liz’s Letters”.

Liz’s letters range in tone from harmless nonsense to strangely-specific misinformation, like in her magnum opus: Liz’s Letter - “5 CONCERNS ABOUT 5G”, where she warns her captive audience of an Orwellian dystopia with “mini cell towers…every 500 feet” and “tumor activity”.

These silly essays, which hide in the very back of thick catalogs, are a convenient metaphor for the way both Liz and Dick Uihlein keep their regrettably tremendous political power low-key.

As a 2018 New York Times article remarks: “Few political donors are as influential, yet little known, as Liz and Dick Uihlein.”

Since 2016, Dick Uihlein has donated nearly $8M to the Tea Party Patriots group, which helped stage the January 2021 Capitol Riot.

Uihlein is also the largest donor behind the biggest anti-abortion political action committee, Women Speak Out.

Source: Financial Times

The thought that far-right political campaigns are supported unknowingly by thousands of business owners when they buy wet floor signs or insulated bubble mailers was enough to sour ULINE for me.

Before getting rid of the catalog, I thought it best to at least use it for something constructive.

This inspired the “ULINE POEMS” that follow.

Join BOUNTY ARCHIVE and Boycott ULINE.

ULINE Poems