Jun 12, 2012

Dear Retailer…

Posted by Wendy Weber

Can an etailer be “too attentive”?

Joe Queenan wrote  funny piece saying that yes, they can!

In a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal, titled Dear Retailer:  I Bought It, Now Go Away, he provides a number of examples of attention overload in the digital era:

…”Think back to the days before email. If somebody who ran a business right next door to you—a business that you didn’t actually patronize—started phoning your office 100 times a year, wouldn’t you stop by and tell her to knock it off? And how would you react if she knocked on your door with little tidbits of info several times a week? If an art museum phoned you with a market-research survey while you were still in the building, wouldn’t you find that a bit annoying? If somebody called you up to tell you that your shipment of an Erroll Garner compact disc had already been loaded onto a UPS truck and was now somewhere between Provo, Utah, and Yonkers, N.Y., wouldn’t you find that just the slightest bit maddening?...”

While many of us appreciate an email confirmation of an online order, Joe’s point is well taken.  We may have created a monster!

In