(This post can also be found at Open Source Politics. It's my first contribution to a very worthwhile project, and it begins a collaboration that I hope will be both long and productive)
Before I get too far into this, let me just state for the record that I hate telemarketers. I don't hate each individual telemarketer, of course, but as a concept I hate telemarketing- and I am hardly alone. Telemarketers are annoying and time-consuming, and they represent everything that is wrong with our technologically-advanced society. There is nothing about the idea of telemarketing that can be defended from where I sit...and yet, if I think about it for any length of time, I also realize that there is more to this issue than simply my visceral revulsion.
On my way home from work on Friday, I listened to an interview on NPR with a Congressman from Omaha, which is the telemarketing capitol of the world. Located within his district are 38 telemarketing companies that employ a total of 39,000 people- 12,000 of whom man the phones. These are single mothers, college students, breadwinners trying to support their family- in short, people a lot like you and me. If we’re going to discuss telemarketing, it only makes sense to put a face on the problem. That person calling you during dinner may be a flaming jackass, but he or she may also be a single parent struggling to put food on their table. They have bills to pay, mouths to feed, and bodies to clothe just as you and I do. The only difference is that they are performing a job that most of us find distasteful.
There are so many telemarketing companies out there because telemarketing clearly works. Most businesses engaged in telemarketing consider it a successful day if a miniscule percentage of calls result in sales- say 1% to 5%. It’s the “throw enough birdshot into the sky, and you’re bound to hit a duck eventually” theory. Businesses succeed by selling their product, and one effective way to do that is to get someone on the phone that might be inclined to purchase said product. If telemarketing didn’t work, companies would not do it.
Yes, it is annoying to get calls from someone selling a good or service that you have no use for or interest in. I would certainly not argue against that point. Let’s try and keep in mind, though, that by attempting to eliminate an industry’s ability to do business, we may also be eliminating a single mother’s ability to feed her children. Is that really what we want? It’s not as if many of the people employed by telemarketing firms will merely transition into other jobs:
[T]he telemarketing industry says it also will wipe out as much as half of its $100 billion in annual sales, send ripples through the fragile U.S. economy and put 2 million of its 6.5 million employees out of work. Industry officials say many of those workers are tough to employ: About 5% are disabled, 26% are single mothers and 95% are not college graduates. Average hourly wage: $9.67.
Yes, it is fashionable, popular, and certainly easy to legislate against the telemarketing industry. Seldom has Congress moved faster than it did this past week when the implementation of the national no-call list was threatened. No politician would ever risk re-election by promising to keep companies from calling during dinner.
There are solutions short of legislating the telemarketing industry out of existence. All of us are smart of enough to avail ourselves of these solutions- and the potential ramifications are far less serious that knee-jerk legislation.
- Hang up the phone when called
- Use caller ID and not answer the phone from unknown callers/li>
- Screen calls with an answering machine
- Use new technology like the Telezapper
- Utilize features from most phone companies that can block all unknown callers
We are, individually and as a nation, smart enough to minimize the aggravation and inconvenience that telemarketing brings into our lives- and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than legislating an entire industry out of existence.
