"Final Notice"? If only!
Are you like me? Are you constantly bombarded with come-ons from people who want to sell you a warranty on your car, or your home? Up until now, I have found these constant pitches pretty annoying, particularly when they had my cell phone going off all day. I eventually figured out how to bounce calls not coming from someone in my contacts; that was a relief. But the warranty goons still clutter up my voicemail box and recent-calls list.
Occasionally, I have to laugh at them. They have George Foreman on TV selling furnace and appliance warranties. The aging champ smiles all the way through the spiel, as if he's in on a splendid joke.
But now my annoyance and amusement have flipped to downright outrage, as I opened my snail mailbox to find this garbage:
They're obviously trying to scare some poor elder or sap into thinking they'll be in trouble with their mortgage company if they don't buy the warranty. That's lower than low. There oughta be a law against that kind of deception. Or if there is such a law, it oughta be enforced.
I have a theory that a hidden (or blatant, but unrecognized) reason this country really started to go to hell was all the court decisions that basically said businesses could lie all they wanted as long as they made the lies impossible to prove. After WWI, mass production required one hell of a lot more consumption than Americans were wont to do without a lot of convincing — so PR gurus set about convincing a country of very frugal, debt-averse people that the road to happiness was paved with more consumption of more stuff, and the selling of more and more stuff required ever more hyperbole and fantasy promotion. Basically, Americans are so marinated in bullshit from birth that it’s little wonder that so many people never develop a working bu meter . . . Because a working BS meter requires a clean control sample, that is, a steady stream of honesty that contrasts with the BS. With the ethic that anything goes in advertising and marketing and the saturation of mass media culture, people just never develop the habit of seeing through BS.
ReplyDeleteI tried complaining to DOJ about advertising like this, especially ones aimed at seniors preying on their fears of random expenses (water supply line insurance being an especially odious scam aimed at seniors). I got nowhere — DOJ has totally given up. As long as the come-ons are just 100% BS but contain no definite, provable lies, they’re fine. It really is a problem.
https://www.consumerreports.org/robocalls/fcc-moves-to-block-car-warranty-robocalls-a5944664470/
ReplyDeleteI used to get tons of these on both home and cell phones, but have gotten exactly zero in the last two months.
Because it was really, really double dog dare your last, last chance.
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