Swing Away Mailbox: An Attempt to Combat the Snowplows

Awhile back Avon resident Scott Simmons got tired of snowplows knocking over the mailbox for his Canton hair salon, The Asylum.

Since his business is right along Route 44, a state highway, he also found it dangerous to get his mail.

“Try to get the mail on Route 44 during rush hour and they’ll run you over,” Simmons said.

So, he designed a Swing Away Mailbox, mounting a fence hinge to a plate steel mailbox spring that allows the mailbox to swing to the right, in the direction of traffic, if snow or vehicles hit it. The mailbox does not swing the other way.

“When the snow [pushed by the snowplow] hits it, it swings [to the right] and the spring bounces back,” Simmons said, though he conceded that if a snow plow hits the base post instead of the mailbox, “it’s going to go down.”

With the heavy snow this season, Simmons, who lived in Simsbury for 20 years, has seen a lot of mailboxes down in the area, and he is offering the Swing Away Mailbox to the local public for the first time and leaving flyers about the Swing Away Mailbox at the homes with fallen mailboxes.

Although it seems snowplow season is over, Simmons said that the mailbox has other functions. He called it “vandalism proof” in the event that someone took a swing at it with a bat from a car driving past it.

The swinging motion also enabled him to swing the mailbox back to retrieve mail without stepping into the road.

He put the first one up outside The Asylum 10 years ago, and it just broke in the fall.

The new mailbox model is attached to a swinging wooden arm.

A new one is up and he also has one at his Avon home on a quiet street. He already has two clients from the salon that have ordered a Swing Away Mailbox and residents are responsible for getting a post and mounting it.

Simmons said that he used to work for a corporate hair salon and that he prefers being an entrepreneur.  

“I promised myself I would never work for someone the rest of my life,” Simmons said. “I got fed up with corporate politics 20 years ago.”

He started The Asylum with $800 to invest in it and a web marketing consulting company called Asylum Marketing, LLC at biznetfix.com with $2,000. His advice when starting a business or creating a product is to put a small amount of money into it early on.

“Start with very little money so that if it doesn’t work, you don’t lose [too much],” he said.

His design is not the only of its kind. There is also the Swinging Mailbox out of Indiana and the Swing Clear mailbox in Michigan.

As he develops the Swing Away mailbox model and solidifies instructions on swingawaymailbox.com, he continues to work on Asylum Marketing. He has hired 12 unemployed people and is training them with web skills to help businesses build websites and make them more easily searchable via Google. Two thirds of the proceeds he makes goes to those contracting employees.