Mar
5
You Say It’s Your Birthday
Filed Under Random Thoughts
This year is the first year I find myself getting birthday greetings from corporations I’ve done business with in the past. This morning, my birthday, I got an automated call from the president Hansel Toyota in Petaluma, who we got our car from.
I find it unsettling on many levels. First, the fact that they know my birthday, and second that they thought it was good marketing to use it to try to get another sale out of me. In case any future marketers are reading this, both Fred (who got the same call on his birthday) and I now have the incentive to never buy anything from Hansel Toyota in the future. Fred got a birthday postcard yesterday from a restaurant in Occidental offering a “Birthday Dinner Discount.” How did they get his birthday, and why did they think it was appropriate to try to sell to us that way.
I think the most disquieting thing for me is that if I were 20 years younger, this probably wouldn’t bother me at all; I’d think it was fun and cute.