The envelope containing details of an Illinois family's personal tragedy. Mike Seay
When Mike Seay arrived home earlier this month and found his wife in the kitchen crying, he braced himself. The couple was still devastated by their daughter's death in a car accident last February, and seeing his wife Shannon distraught, he prepared for the worst.
Mrs. Seay showed him a mailing sent by OfficeMax Inc. Below his name was printed "Daughter Killed In Car Crash."
How does such a horrific detail land on a junk mail envelope? Most likely from a customer-service representative who collects information during a sale for the store's use, according to an executive who knows the data-collection industry. Details are electronically passed from company to company and finally to a printer.
Such incidents are inevitable—part of the cost of doing business in collecting and collating information on millions of individuals, said Steven Sheck, owner of customer-data provider MailingLists.com. On rare occasions he has seen obscenities find their way into mailing addresses, likely entered by angry customer-service representatives during a contentious telephone call.
"The rep writes 'Steven Sheck [expletive],' and the next time that list gets rented out that's how the name gets listed," Mr. Sheck said. "You filter out 99.8% of the obscenities but you are talking about hundreds of millions of opportunities for that to happen to you and eventually it catches up."
OfficeMax said it doesn't know how the information got there.
"We would like nothing more than to tell the world what happened," said a spokeswoman for the Naperville, Ill., chain, which merged last year with rival Office Depot Inc. "We don't know what happened yet. We haven't been told. It was not our data and we don't have access to the original information."
The Seay family on Christmas 2012: Mike Seay (last row at left) and Ashley and Shannon (second row, from left). Mike Seay
OfficeMax rented Mr. Seay's data from gift retailer Things Remembered Inc., according to two data broker firms involved in the transaction. OfficeMax used the gift retailer's list in an attempt to reach out to small businesses with store-coupon mailers, according to Rob Sanchez, chief executive of MeritDirect LLC, which acts as broker for OfficeMax's customer data.
Mr. Seay, who lives in Lindenhurst, Ill., owns several small businesses.
The Seay family tragedy ended up on the mailer by accident, Mr. Sanchez said. "There was not at any time an intention to target based on that information," Mr. Sanchez said. "That was no one's intention. It wouldn't have made sense."
A spokeswoman for Infogroup Inc., a data broker that buys and sells data for Things Remembered, confirmed that the data had originated from the Highland Heights, Ohio, gift retailer.
One clue on how it got the detail came from a purchase at the store. Mr. Seay said friends of the family recently sent a set of digital picture frames from the Things Remembered retail chain, to display photos of his daughter Ashley, who was 17.
But if that is how it learned of her accident, Mr. Seay said Things Remembered should never have entered that information into its computers. "The question is why did they need to input it and why did they keep it?" he said.
Things Remembered declined to comment.
Retailers have been buying and selling customer information through brokers for decades.
What has changed is Big Data technology now allows data brokers to weave together information from lots of sources. These separate details are prized for their ability to pinpoint prospects when matched with retail sales and other information.
Brokers now collect and sell customer lists separated by customer hobbies and ethnicity. Some brokers even create lists of people with medical conditions such as obesity by gathering data on shopping habits.
All this data crunching also makes it tempting for retailers to collect more consumer information, which can later be sold or traded through brokers.
For example, OfficeMax offers to rent its own customers' addresses for $120 a thousand names, according to public information available on the Internet. For $15 more, buyers can separate those customers by the type of products they purchased.
Terry Mulhern, a former vice president of marketing at Things Remembered, said that during his time at the company it targeted customers for gift promotions by acquiring from data sellers the dates of family occasions, like wedding and graduation dates.
Knowing the exact date, he said, allows retailers to send gift promotions at the right time. For example, "groomsmen buy gifts 24 hours before the wedding, while the bridesmaids buy it a month ahead," said Mr. Mulhern, who is now chief operating officer at Epiphany Management Group LLC, an educational technology vendor.
But Mr. Mulhern, who left the company in 2006, doesn't believe it would seek to gather data about family tragedies to pitch sympathy gifts. "I find it very odd that this type of error would happen," Mr. Mulhern said.
After receiving the mailing, an incredulous Mr. Seay posted a photo of the OfficeMax envelope and address on his Facebook page.
It was quickly picked up by a Chicago television station and the details of the letter and family tragedy soon went nationwide.
Mr. Seay said he received a call on Jan. 19 from an OfficeMax executive to apologize. The executive told him it was a "computer error," and that the company wasn't clear on the details.
Mrs. Seay tore the phone out of her husband's hand and demanded more information, telling the executive "a human had to input this—a computer doesn't do this on its own," according to Mr. Seay. "Don't call back until you can tell us how it happened," she said before hanging up.
The retailer never rang back. It still has few details to offer on how the incident happened, according to the OfficeMax spokeswoman.