I suppose it’s my own fault. I am the person who decided to be self-employed. No one told me how ineffective the No Call list would be when I signed up for it. Today, for instance, I took a call from a vendor. Actually, my cell phone logged his call – he wasn’t polite enough to leave a message. When I became aware of the call about 15 minutes later, I called him. Perhaps I wouldn’t have bothered if I knew in advance it was a vendor call, but I called and talked with a man who seemed personable enough at first.
He asked if I shopped at the Safeway in Estes Park, Colorado. Now that’s a pretty safe bet for him – as residents, we don’t have any other real options unless we want to burn up about $15 in gas at today’s prices, just to have a choice of supermarkets. He then explained that he worked for a nationally known marketing company that put advertisements in the shopping carts at the Safeway where I shopped.
Now I’ve been wondering what the ads cost, and I asked the man. When he said $90 a week I successfully fought the urge to laugh and/or choke and told him I wasn’t interested at this time. He hung up before I could thank the nice man for his call…
I don’t have a degree in marketing but I do know a little about it. As a person in the real estate industry, I market myself and my product with regularity. Frankly, if I’m to spend $4680.00 a year to have my mug look up at the Safeway shoppers from their carts, I need more information on why it’s worth the cost. I know other people in my business use this media – does it work for them? I didn’t get the chance to ask the nice vendor – and considering his obvious attitude, I’m absolutely sure I never will. I’d saw off my arm first!
Thinking back on the call today, it caused me to categorize other calls from vendors that I’ve taken. In my experience, about 99% of them fall into two categories:
- Hang-up-on-the-vendor calls:
These are the calls where you are victimized by some salesperson who doesn’t realize (or apparently even care) that you may have something else (anything at all) to do that does not involve listening to him. The only practical way to survive this type of call is to hang up on the vendor. The example in my experience is the gold salesman. I’m a curious sort, and I was recently wondering about the price of gold. I bought a piece of gold once and it immediately plunged in value – taking nearly a decade to catch back up. So I called. It was, after all, a 1-800 call (my favorite kind), and I told the guy up front that I would not be interested in buying any gold at this time. Oddly, he didn’t hear me say that. He’s called me several times since then and listening to him is the verbal equivalent to the Chinese water treatment. It truly is amazing how many words can be said between breaths!
- Hang-up-on-you calls:
That’s what I had today. I understand the principle of “Time Is Money” well enough to know the call won’t go on too long after I decline the pitch, but this brand of marketing buffoon doesn’t have or value manners at all. What if I think about it and decide to call back and go for the deal? In this scenario, no one with any degree of sanity would ever re-contact anyone this impolite – no matter what the product.
Recently I’ve talked with someone who works retail and was told about a customer who must be a second-generation #1 or #2, above. The customer called about a service the retail company does not provide – never has – and upon finding out that her needs couldn’t be met by this establishment, she angrily stated, “Well, I guess you’re going to lose the money, aren’t you?”
OK, here’s how this works – when you’re feeling particularly amenable to increasing angst in some total stranger, call a company and ask them to provide a service they do not provide. Then threaten them with losing the sale when you get turned down. Makes sense if you are as impolite as the man I spoke with about Safeway shopping carts.
Perhaps we are missing a bet in Reality TV (sort of an oxymoron hidden in that title…). Maybe we should have Victim TV Vending shows, featuring vendors from the two categories above matched with “victims” secretly nominated by the viewing audience. Oh I know something like that has been tried before, but in this generation it would at least make us more prepared for election year phone calls, vendors #1 and #2 above, and provide a telephone training regimen for the quiet majority in America that have yet to raise their fists and shout together, “ENOUGH!”.
Come to think of it, they’re probably on the phone.
