Sharp Business
Friday, September 24th, 2004Companies tell little lies to get business, and people seem to be ignorant or forgiving, or maybe they have to accept it. I’ve written about the rebate scam that companies use to make prices appear lower and then they never honor the mail-in rebate. When Maxtor did this to me, I switched to Seagate drives, and I’m much happier with their reliability and quiet fluid dynamic bearing motors. Do honest companies produce better products?
How do dishonest companies stay in business? One reason is that they are practically monopolies. Ticketmaster seems to cross the line to get business with its practices. Some people, who ordered tickets but turned down a magazine offer, found they were charged for the subscription anyway. I recently purchased tickets using their online site. When you search for tickets, you get a lock on them for a couple minutes while you checkout. Unless you can quickly decide on the tickets and enter all your billing and shipping information, you lose the tickets. Instead of giving you more time, they want you to register beforehand for a quicker checkout. When I registered, I had to provide my e-mail address and answer whether I wanted to receive their spam. Even though I was careful to turn off their e-mail subscriptions, I started receiving them anyway. Logging into the site, the checkbox for the subscriptions was magically turned on again. But to order tickets again, what other choices do I have?
Other websites don’t force you to register, but require your e-mail address at checkout, so they can spam you relentlessly. I did this at macys.com, and not only does their spam not contain an opt-out link, but their website has no feature to turn off the spam. They have a form to sign-up for e-mail, but no form to opt-out.
The CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) that passed last year has had no effect. According to one study, less than one percent of spam they examined was in compliance. At least the Act lives up to its name (spammers “can spam”). In fact, spam has gotten worse. If you are bold enough to click on a “remove me” link, you’ll find you just get more spam instead. One clever spammer has an opt-out link that infects your machine, exploiting a JavaScript DragDrop bug and downloading malicious code (presumably to turn you into a spam relay).
All of these activities are illegal, but businesses do it anyway. Until laws are enforced to the point of making it too expensive to do business this way, it’s up to us give our business to honest companies … when that’s possible.