Update: A manager at Love’s called shortly after I posted this and was unhappy to hear that I had so much trouble getting this SMS spam to stop. I take his apology at face value. I told him it took me awhile to figure out where it was coming from, so maybe they’ll do a better job of including the ID in the messages from here on out. At any rate, this hyperbolic rant stands because it took so long to get a response. My first attempt to contact them was last week.
Original post…
Boycott Love’s! Actually, that would be pointless.
The economy is declining; we are headed for a crash. However, “crash” in this sense does not mean that economic activity stops, but that it reverts to some level far below what we consider sustainable. It moves at a pace and with a volume insufficient for the population to be comfortable. Across the whole country, some specific locations will be worse than others. Some fortunate few will continue living comfortably while most will suffer varying degrees of deprivation, at least compared to what life was like a decade ago.
Those who have some sense of proportion will simply adjust. In our current cultural climate, that’s a pretty small slice of our population. Most will continue with their highly inflated sense of entitlement. That unrealistic sense of demand is what causes people to act crazy, including criminal acts aimed at relieving the distress. However, the majority will at least spend some time first testing the waters of bad ethics before actual criminality.
In broad general terms, marketers and advertisers were already splashing around in bad ethics. They’ve been studying ways to manipulate and prey on typical human thought patterns. They knew long ago, for example, that pissing people off is almost as good as making them love your brand name. Thus, annoying the shit out of them would still cause them end up looking for your products because it dominates their memories. We few normal folks won’t fall for that, but the vast majority of our society has been conditioned to operate that way. In other words, it’s a tactic that generally works for the marketers.
That tactic depends, of course, on a means of advertising delivery that people can’t or won’t shut out. You like TV? Radio? Precious few are the media outlets that don’t come with advertising. Sure, we had some juggling back and forth with various ways to block or skip over advertising, but we have been conditioned to think it’s unethical to do that. Think about that for a moment. Think about how the vast majority of advertising is an attempt to manipulate you into buying something you don’t want or need. Our entire system of commerce and production is based on the assumption that you will be advertised into docility and not expect much from the products so that you’ll always be dissatisfied and keep buying. There is a sense in which the marketers own the entire system, and never offering more than useless crap so you are forced to endure their harassment.
Yes, by using WordPress without paying for the service, I’m forced to endure whatever shitty advertising they put at the bottom of my posts. I wish I could afford to “go premium” but it won’t happen any time soon. Please forgive me.
When it became possible to take advantage of cheaper means of delivering advertising through newer communication systems, they jumped on it. In no time at all we discovered that the difference between a genuine pitch and spam is virtually nothing. Would you believe that most spammers will deliver, more or less on what they advertise? They might be lying about what the product will do, but if you give them money, they send what they offer. The problem is that a significant number of us did not agree to tolerate the spam. That is, while we grudgingly tolerate advertising on TV, radio, blogs, etc., we don’t agree that the mere possession of an email account justifies just any jerk from dumping marketing bilge into it.
Rightly so; you did not agree to it. It’s one thing when the company hosting your free email account inserts ads where you can see them when you use the service. It’s another when some third party, not a party to the working agreement, abuses the opportunity to advertise in a way you cannot block. Sure, we now have the on-going development of spam filtering with some of these “free email” providers. Spam email still accounts for the majority of all Internet traffic. Though the numerical portion seems to vary, it’s often cited around 80%-90%. The way the Internet is designed and operated, there’s not much they can do to eliminate it, but I see that most of it never gets delivered and served up to human eyeballs. Still, spammers abuse the system, which makes them almost exactly the same kind of slimeballs as every other marketer.
Still, when it comes through the system and wastes your time and attention, you are rightly pissed off. You may not be able to do much about it, but your offense is wholly morally justified. Granted, there is the possibility that you can strike back, but it usually takes more effort than you might be willing to expend. Sometimes, it just might be worth it.
Only just this month I’ve purchased from my cellphone provider SMS (AKA “texting”). Immediately I started getting weekly spam texts from Love’s Deal Alerts. Of course, they were too smart to let me know that was the sponsor. Instead, they used a deceptive “common short code” — 56837. You might have a devil of a time finding out who is behind some of those codes, but I stumbled across this page and it helps a lot. In this case, Love’s is a major corporation that started here in Oklahoma and owns truck stops and a bunch of “country stores.”
By no means did I subscribe to this damned nuisance texting service. Worse, there was no simple way to unsubscribe. I’ve used their website contact page, emailed the webmaster, and even filed a complaint with the FCC. So far, the messages still come weekly, typically right when I’m doing something important. This whole thing is precisely the kind of unethical behavior that makes sensible people hate advertisers and their advertising. The only thing I haven’t tried is picketing their local truck stop or physically visiting their corporate offices. It’s the sort of thing where, if they won’t honor the typical efforts to be relieved of the nuisance, then their ethics are so low you should expect it would take genuine threats of physical violence, which would also get me into big trouble while they get to continue their evil ways.
Love’s is just one a million operations all too willing to abuse any angle they can to avoid the valid general suffering we all have to face with a declining economy. You can bet they serve as merely one example of the frantic spamming we have only just begun to see.
