promotions

[cellio]

Today's mail included an exclusive offer for a heavily-discounted trip to Orlando, just for me. It came, of course, by bulk mail.

The Ford salesman called me a couple days ago (didn't expect to hear from him again). He said they're now giving away trips to Orlando or Las Vegas, and would I come up to [ridiculous price] for that? I said that was a disincentive; if I want to buy a trip I'll buy a trip, but when I want to buy a car I'm interested in dollars, period.

In neither case did I hear details like black-out dates. This doesn't strike me as the time of year to promote trips to Florida, but maybe if travel is restricted to this coming July that makes sense.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I've noticed telemarketing scams are promoting travel heavily lately. You might want to compare your mail with the call which I got.

[cellio]

I've already thrown out the mail, so I don't know if it's the same folks.

I hate the recordings from telemarketers that get left on the machine. Not only are their devices not smart enough to detect the machine and abort, but they're also not smart enough to wait for the beep. The do-not-call list has cut down on these, but political and charitable organizatins are apparently exempt.

When an actual human calls (and I'm home and pick up the phone), I at least have the satisfaction of telling the caller that I always discontinue support for organizations that call me against my instructions.

[madfilkentist]

Funny how politicians always exempt themselves from their own laws.

Some telescammers go a step further and leave a recording on your machine telling you to press 9 for further info. People who are already violating multiple FTC rules (prohibiting a sales pitch made entirely by recording, and requiring proper identification of the calling company) aren't going to be bothered by little things like do-not-call lists.

[cellio]

I got repeated calls recently from someone who never left a name (at least during the part of the recording that the machine picked up) and just left a number. After four days in a row I decided to find out who it was, just in case a soon-to-be-former service provider of mine was actually that dim. It turned out to be a collection agent looking for someone completely different. And, of course, the first time a human was involved was when I called them.