Stalked by an online supermarket that wants a 'relationship' | Hacker News Reader

Stalked by an online supermarket that wants a 'relationship'

theguardian.com

58 pointsghosh23 comments

"What we appear to have imported is overfamiliarity without good service". Heck yes! I'm constantly impressed at the amount of interaction companies want from me for the smallest transaction. It reminds me of a quote from the movie "BASEketball":

"The athletes caring less about executing the play than planning the vulgar grandstanding that inevitably followed even the most pedestrian of accomplishments"

Hey, I used your online-fax service to send a fax that I need to do once, ever, and now you're sending me notes from your CEO. Who likes this crap?!

My two favorite email marketing tropes:

1. 'New' newsletters from ridiculous SV companies that have NO reason to email otherwise. (Of course, I'm opted-in by default.) I always read it as: "hi, we have retention problems so we're going to annoy customers because business!" Buffer did this recently.

2. Nag emails about ignoring previous feedback emails: "Please give us feedback about your recent car maintenance!" No, I won't, especially since you nagged! But I will report as spam.

My ultimate wish for email is that I'm left alone. You'd think companies would realize that when they have my hotmail account.

Interesting! I was aware of parasocial relationships [1], but mainly as things where media consumers feel like they know stars even though they don't.

This is in a way the reverse, where a brand pretends to know consumers in hopes of generating social feelings. Creepy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

From a sales perspective, this is something that companies will always try. After all, if you weren't going to buy there again, so the supermarket has nothing to lose. If, on the other hand, they were able to turn a single one-time buyer into a regularly returning customer, then that's excellent business. Of course they are not catering to you in 99% of cases, but 1% return rate will be enough with this kind of sales.

(I am always amazed by the analogies between sales and dating.)

Several of the author's primary examples were actually companies she's continued to do business with, so they're clearly not applying this just to customers who weren't going to come back. I've certainly decided not to deal with a company again because right after the initial transaction I've gotten hit with a flood of this spam. I suspect there's one of the standard measurement issues where companies find it easier to quantify customers who've apparently come back due to this kind of marketing than to measure customers who've gotten sick of it and reduced or ceased their business with the company. It's possible to do a better job, but these companies never seem to and it might be that there's a perverse incentive for the marketers to mismeasure.

Having worked directly under the SVP of Business Intelligence & Analytics at one of the larger US-based social networks I can say from experience that it's really, really hard to get people to consider the things that are hard to measure or hard to interpret. Even in a company that's heavily analytics-driven there's a lot of magical thinking, a lot of anecdata, and a strong bias towards short term effects. Think of it as the marketing equivalent of laying off 20% of your workforce, telling everyone else to work 25% harder, and convincing Wall Street this means profits will go up and stay up.

It's easy to spot the bump in your balance sheet from lower costs and it's hard to quantify the long term costs of decreased morale, lower total productivity, most likely lower individual productivity, attrition, and inability to take advantage of opportunities.

Mmmm... you also need to subtract the PR damage this kind of behavior gives them; and when not doing it actually becomes a feature by your competition (Soon enough: "We never send you any mail! No anniversaries or spammy stuff like that")

> you also need to subtract the PR damage this kind of behavior gives them

Which, right now, is essentially zero. It would be good if we could figure out a way to vastly increase that damage, but I don't see how to do it while staying legal.

I get this all the time from Ocado. I stopped using them to be honest because they're expensive and the quality of items is no better than ASDA who are a 5 min walk down the road from me. Plus I don't smash my own eggs EVERY FRIKKING DELIVERY.

However, I get an email at least once every two days offering free this and that despite opting out. Obviously they've cottoned onto the fact I'm shopping elsewhere and keep sending begging emails and free delivery subscriptions to get me to come back.

If a company needs a procmail filter line, they can go to hell.

I would strongly question that. We get our home delivery from Tesco or Sainsbury (depending who's annoyed us least that month). We have tried Asda. We will never do so again, given their consistent blithering incompetence at actual useful reliable home delivery. They're lovely about it, but I'd sorta rather they didn't mess up in the first place. NEVER AGAIN.

(This is deliveries out of the Enfield warehouse to E17 - perhaps you have a competent delivery area.)

It sounds like the previous commenter is just getting the groceries themselves because the ASDA is so close by.

I wouldn't use ASDA delivery - you're right: they are total incompetent. I walk to the shop and carry it back.

To be fair I've tried Sainsburys, Tesco, Ocado and ASDA delivery. Ocado is the best delivery by miles but it's overpriced and you get screwed around Christmas time religiously even if you have a subscription delivery.

Decided to just do the shopping myself in the end. I'm spoiled with a Waitrose, ASDA and Tesco within 0.5 mile of me but choose ASDA as to be honest the meat is better than Waitrose. Tesco - everything is universally shit from there.

I spend less, eat better and throw less away if I do the shopping myself a couple of times a week. The only killer is Pringles on offer :)

Heh. It was shopping in ASDA in person that made me decide that five quid for home delivery was WORTH EVERY PENNY. Also saves on dagger blades from wanting to stab every annoying person in the shop on a Saturday afternoon.

We get monthly regular stuff 'cos neither of us wants to lug the stuff back. 10 bags of cat litter? No, you have a truck to bring me that with.

I go shopping at around midnight. There are less people to want to stab then plus you get some crazy bargains. Got a whole 1.5Kg beef sirloin joint for £1 and had steak the next day :)

Try to actually treat it as a relationship and generate epic troll?

Restraining order, anyone?

Does this kind of harrassment-marketing really work?

Until someone creates a payer based email system, yes this will work because the cost of spam is almost 0.

Now imagine a system where you get paid a penny (or dime?) for every email sent to you by someone not on your contact list, with the only caveat that the other person has to opt in to the same system. Could this take off and be the gmail killer? (Perhaps you could even allow email from approved non-members)

Unfortunately, no. Obligatory reading:

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

The below assumes the worst case, some of these will be mutually exclusive (hit by different potential implementations).

    Your post advocates a
    
    (0) technical
    
    approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
    won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
    idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to
    state before a bad federal law was passed.)
    
    (1) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
    (2) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
    (3) Users of email will not put up with it
    (4) Microsoft will not put up with it
    (5) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
    (6) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate
        potential employers
    
    Specifically, your plan fails to account for
    
    (7) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
    (8) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
    (9) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
    (10) Extreme profitability of spam
    (11) Outlook
    
    and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
    
    (12) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
        been shown practical

    (13) Whitelists suck
    (14) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
    (15) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
    (16) Sending email should be free

That said, a lot of these can clearly be designed around. I think 12 is the most significant point, though everything fails to work until it works. Everyone should feel free to dig into particular points below. It may well be intractable, but snarky posts from before bitcoin don't demonstrate that.

Facebook is charging 0,70$ to deliver messages you send to random people /into their inbox/ instead of the 'other' folder. Which to me seems brilliant.

What if they send them from gmail or somewhere else?

I would imagine a system with a whitelist. Anyone not on the whitelist, gets an automatic reply and his email is not even processed. The reply email has a captcha, once you solve it you can send the email that will be processed and read. The receiver can decide whether to put you on a whitelist or not. So a friendly message will require at most a single captcha, and from then on work normally. Those emails that get trough, have shown enough effort for you to read, and if it is spam, you put it on an always-block-blacklist.

The captcha or something equivalent has to be only hard enough so the spammers time isn't worth it.

Of course email replies to you would always get trough.

The worst is politicians that buy your email from somewhere and then send you personalized emails that "support my rights" and then proceed to tell me what they should be. Woe unto anyone that uses a real email address for anything these days.

Even worse when it's not even a politician from your own country. I'm looking at you Rand Paul.

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