Customer Love

My wife had been out of town all of last week, so when she got back on Friday, we took the chance to do something we don't do too often: watch a few movies. We went and picked up two of them from the local store, one of which was National Treasure 2. Put it into the DVD player, fired it up, and got treated to eight and a half minutes advertisements.

The best part?

There was no way to skip or fast forward through them. (Even more fun when a pillow fell off the couch an onto the remote, causing the series to reset back to zero after going about a third of the way through).

I don't understand the reasoning behind it. We chose to pay for the movie. We are then forced to watch a preview for Snow White NOW ON BLU-RAY!!!! Followed then by further re-dredges from their vault, now on a brand new format. However, if we would have viewed the movie through an alternative means, we would have watched the movie, and just the movie, and not have been subjected to a bunch of marketing tripe.

Companies whine and whine about how their distribution rights are being infringed upon, and yet, they are the very one's who can't deliver a product that people want to pay for. Is anyone surprised here?

Cutting the Fat

Verizon's email client on their cell phones is pretty much garbage, so I've abandoned using it altogether. Opting to simply forward my personal email, all of it, to my cell phone's SMS email address. Basically letting the text messaging act as an instant email notification. This had a very unexpected side effect, though. It made me very conscious about what exactly I was getting in my email.

Every email message is now sent to my phone, and I realized just how much garbage I was getting. Things that I really don't care about, that I was always a bit too lazy to opt-out of, but still didn't mind deleting on a regular basis, week after week, or month after month. Not really spam, just solicited advertising that I had been given due to my email address being in some companies database.

It certainly gave me the incentive to take the few seconds to opt out of those emails. Got me thinking, also, as to how many other people do the same thing. Legitimate email advertisements, that they don't even read, but never bother to opt out of, just deleting them over and over ad nauseam.