Caveat Emptor: Customers as "Marks"

The 21st century style of cold calls or sales.
The office telephone rings. You answer and the caller demands, "I need to talk to the person in charge of the utility (or telephone, credit card, business insurance) account." You ask, "Who is calling?" The sternly toned response is, "Are YOU the person in charge of this account?"

The tone is officious and demanding. It intimates this call is from officialdom or from a vendor who has missed a payment or found a discrepancy in your account. Careful questioning is met with confrontational demands to "speak with the person in charge." The implication being no one else can be told what the caller has to say -- further creating the impression of a problem with an existing account.

If you ask to take a message, the caller usually refuses, asking when the person in charge will be available. If you say you are "the person in charge," the confrontational tone does not end. They are seeking to sell you a product change or addition. But the approach is that if you do not accept their product, you are making a serious mistake that could compromise your position and/or your business.

One such caller demanded, "Don't you know what deregulation means?" As if by resisting I was violating some kind of regulation.

The only way to terminate the call is to hang up. As long as you refuse their offers, they will continue to badger you.

Initially I assumed these callers were ill-suited to their jobs. Yesterday I had an Epiphany. The cold callers are TRAINED to bully the potential customers they call. It happens far too often to be accidental.

We inhabit a world in which customer abuse and lies have become the foundation of commerce. You cannot trust your banks, your credit card providers, your superstores, your computer hardware and software providers, the providers of your utilities, or your insurance companies. Every one of them will cheat and lie to you on a daily basis. It brings new understanding to the Roman saying "caveat emptor."