Several years ago I tried to courteously pre-empt the routine at Toys R Us after several visits, thinking I had it down. As I handed the checkout guy whatever I was buying I said with a friendly smile "I'd just like to buy this, I'll pay by credit card, I do not have or want a rewards card, I do not need batteries, and you may not have my phone number." He grinned back at me and with a gleam of triumph in his eye said "Would you like to pre-order The Lion King 2 on DVD?"
(might have been another movie, don't remember exactly).
Maybe such small victories help make the clerk's day bearable.
Sad but true, the registers keep track of who sells the add-on crap. There are daily/weekly/monthly goals to be met and they affect raises and bonuses.
Although with the Lion King drama, I'd be tempted to get halfway through it and then cancel. That's always good times with a snotty clerk.
I hate upselling and, other than the fact I am an unrepentant misanthrope, is one of the major reasons I shop nearly 100% online.
Except for groceries and prescriptions, my buying is mostly online, too. However. . . even Amazon will show me items from my wish list or items others have bought. No, I'm not trapped like with a B & M clerk, but they still tempt me. And once in a while, it works. Something goes on my wish list for my next purchasing spree -- gotta get that free shipping, so the small items get saved for another over $25 purchase.
Years ago I was in Sears because they had a dehumidifier on sale for $50 less than anyone else.
I got a very pushy saleswoman who tried to sell me the replacement plan (for about $40) at least 4 times during the 5 minute transaction. After I turned it down for the 4th time, she announced in a loud, sneering voice to everyone in the vicinity "The customer has declined the replacement plan!"
It occurred to me that they are under pressure to meet a quota, but her attitude during the whole transaction was one of that from someone who prided themselves as being a super salesperson.
It even happens on websites. Yesterday I booked a flight for 6 of us on a low cost Irish carrier (Europeans will know exactly who I mean and totally understand). They are very cheap but have lots of add-ons to make up their profit. I tend to avoid flying with them , but with what will be a seven month old and a two and a half year old when we go on holiday we wanted to fly from our nearest airport to home to one that is closest to the area of Spain we want to go to, so we had no alternative. I must have been asked about six times by pop-ups to buy travel insurance. We have no need of it because we have an annual policy, but it got really annoying. At the end we were asked twice about hotels and car hire. It is never ending - the email confirmation contained another attempt to sell travel insurance!
@greg, That sounds like Ryanair, the GoDaddy of the skies. GoDaddy is notorious for its constant and often very confusing checkout process which a near endless maze of upsells.
Sears & now KMart are ridiculous on the replacement plans. Buy a CrockPot for $12 and buy a replacement plan? Um, no.
The only thing I've bought replacement plans for were my ipods & digital cameras, and it turned out to be a good thing, because they are easily dropped.
Is the aforementioned airline the same one that makes you pay to use the flying loo?
I never shop Sears unless it's for a particular advertised product that's way lower than anyone else - one too many $800 car repair estimate for something that ended costing me around $200 at the locally owned shop.
And replacement plans shouldn't cost up to a 3rd of original product price like some of them do (they should cost about 10% tops). I noticed that some of the stores like Best Buy selling scratch insurance for their video games at $4.99 a pop.
I'm trying to figure out which alternative to use over GoDaddy because I just can't stand their constant upselling. That, and I fell like I'm doing something dirty at work when I have to go to their website for DNS maintenance.
These artists never actually performed together, but they are together on eMusic every day.
Not to mention, they are also together on Amazon and iTunes every day! Along with a number of other popular bands that are no longer on eMusic. Just sayin'.
These artists never actually performed together, but they are together on eMusic every day.
Not to mention, they are also together on Amazon and iTunes every day! Along with a number of other popular bands that are no longer on eMusic. Just sayin'.
Exactly. This whole production is tremendously irritating. Just the whole concept of it displays a profound misconception of their whole product. They are an online mp3 distributor. They have no physical product. They exist in a medium of code. What they hell are they doing driving vans down city streets and showing videos on buildings with projectors? Are they gonna give away physical cds in the promo? Of course not.
If they want to impress, they should be enhancing their code (so to speak). Their bells and whistles should be planted dead center of the internet. Oh never mind, I've already lost interest in this rant. Emu is tiresome.
@thom: I used to use Dotster for registration & they were pretty clean. Lately my host (Dreamhost) is a registrar & about as cheap as anybody with 0 BS.
@jonahpwll: I realized a few years ago it was pointless telling eMu how to be the best place on the net for music, because that isn't their business model. Around that time, Music Lover had inferred that their business model is actually to sign up as many free trials as possible, because a lot of people forget to cancel. The music is just the hook. This goes a long way toward explaining the vans and the video projection.
Also, Vile Machinations would be an excellent album title.
@frog, et. al.: If I want a protection plan for something I go to SquareTrade. Until very recently, my wife preferred film cameras and I bought a warranty to protect all those mechanical parts.
Yes, I know that was ages ago but I got stuck abroad without power and couldn't reply.
This should have been alarming, what with severe minus temperatures outside, but since this was outside the UK it wasn't really a problem. The one gratifying result was that I saved some money on a new 'scam' invented by a low cost airline (Hungarian this time). Here's what happens:
They send an email requesting additional information - if you don't provide it you may not be allowed on the plane. There is a link, which doesn't lead anywhere useful, and no sign of the required page anywhere on the site. You have to phone a premium rate phone number. They keep you on hold for well over 10 mins only to tell you that the information is not required for that particular flight. The explanation given for the email being completely inadequate and nonsensical (the guy on the phone actually sounded like he knew he was spouting rubbish).
The cost of the phone call - aprox 30% of the cost of the flight ex. tax!
When I got home I found another of those emails asking for passport info for the return trip.
The trouble is that I know they do need the info for some flights.
grrr
ok, sorry, rant over
Scrobbling has not been working for months. I was hoping this latest itunes would fix it.
Nope. 31 random tracks from March 2010 got scrobbled.
And my last hundreds of plays didn't even get their play counts updated in itunes, much less on lastfm.
Drag, Katrina. I think there are ways to look at the error logs from scrobbling, under Help->Diagnostics. See if you can find some errors then search on that.
This is crazy! Just for grins, I hit the sync button again. It picked a nice selection: one song it says it played in 2004, then two from 2008, a bunch from 2010, and finally the last 60 or so I just finished listening to.
Yeah, I'll see what the ipod diagnostics say. And if there's anything in the scrobbler. Thanks.
Iirc, you can manually 'scrobble ipod' even without having the ipod in, assuming that your itunes library registers your ipod stuff. (I suppose you've verified that your iTunes lib does indeed register the ipod's play data?)
Scrobbling is pretty whacky sometimes. Fortunately mine usually scrobbles all or nothing. When nothing, it almost always works when I scrobble manually.
Karg, I did not know that you could scrobble after detaching the iPod.
Scrobbling interacts with your iTunes lib, logging everything played since last scrobble. If you sync your ipod without scrobbling activated, you can later activate and manually scrobble, and (normally) it will scrobble everything in your lib since last scrobble. The "scrobble ipod" part is just the automatic activation of scrobbling when you sync - it doesn't actually talk to the ipod at all, just the library.
Yeah, that makes sense. And yet it seems there have been times when I couldn't recover scrobbles after detaching the iPod. (I have an old shuffle that will only scrobble manually.) May turn off auto-scrobbling and see how it works.
Comments
(might have been another movie, don't remember exactly).
Maybe such small victories help make the clerk's day bearable.
Although with the Lion King drama, I'd be tempted to get halfway through it and then cancel. That's always good times with a snotty clerk.
Except for groceries and prescriptions, my buying is mostly online, too. However. . . even Amazon will show me items from my wish list or items others have bought. No, I'm not trapped like with a B & M clerk, but they still tempt me. And once in a while, it works. Something goes on my wish list for my next purchasing spree -- gotta get that free shipping, so the small items get saved for another over $25 purchase.
(347)-269-0682
It's the voicemail number for the NY chapter of NAMBLA.
I got a very pushy saleswoman who tried to sell me the replacement plan (for about $40) at least 4 times during the 5 minute transaction. After I turned it down for the 4th time, she announced in a loud, sneering voice to everyone in the vicinity "The customer has declined the replacement plan!"
It occurred to me that they are under pressure to meet a quota, but her attitude during the whole transaction was one of that from someone who prided themselves as being a super salesperson.
Hope so for her sake, because Third prize is you're fired.
The only thing I've bought replacement plans for were my ipods & digital cameras, and it turned out to be a good thing, because they are easily dropped.
I never shop Sears unless it's for a particular advertised product that's way lower than anyone else - one too many $800 car repair estimate for something that ended costing me around $200 at the locally owned shop.
And replacement plans shouldn't cost up to a 3rd of original product price like some of them do (they should cost about 10% tops). I noticed that some of the stores like Best Buy selling scratch insurance for their video games at $4.99 a pop.
Craig
but it comes with a chance to win a poser poster.
Not to mention, they are also together on Amazon and iTunes every day! Along with a number of other popular bands that are no longer on eMusic. Just sayin'.
Exactly. This whole production is tremendously irritating. Just the whole concept of it displays a profound misconception of their whole product. They are an online mp3 distributor. They have no physical product. They exist in a medium of code. What they hell are they doing driving vans down city streets and showing videos on buildings with projectors? Are they gonna give away physical cds in the promo? Of course not.
If they want to impress, they should be enhancing their code (so to speak). Their bells and whistles should be planted dead center of the internet. Oh never mind, I've already lost interest in this rant. Emu is tiresome.
@jonahpwll: I realized a few years ago it was pointless telling eMu how to be the best place on the net for music, because that isn't their business model. Around that time, Music Lover had inferred that their business model is actually to sign up as many free trials as possible, because a lot of people forget to cancel. The music is just the hook. This goes a long way toward explaining the vans and the video projection.
Also, Vile Machinations would be an excellent album title.
@frog, et. al.: If I want a protection plan for something I go to SquareTrade. Until very recently, my wife preferred film cameras and I bought a warranty to protect all those mechanical parts.
Yes, I know that was ages ago but I got stuck abroad without power and couldn't reply.
This should have been alarming, what with severe minus temperatures outside, but since this was outside the UK it wasn't really a problem. The one gratifying result was that I saved some money on a new 'scam' invented by a low cost airline (Hungarian this time). Here's what happens:
They send an email requesting additional information - if you don't provide it you may not be allowed on the plane. There is a link, which doesn't lead anywhere useful, and no sign of the required page anywhere on the site. You have to phone a premium rate phone number. They keep you on hold for well over 10 mins only to tell you that the information is not required for that particular flight. The explanation given for the email being completely inadequate and nonsensical (the guy on the phone actually sounded like he knew he was spouting rubbish).
The cost of the phone call - aprox 30% of the cost of the flight ex. tax!
When I got home I found another of those emails asking for passport info for the return trip.
The trouble is that I know they do need the info for some flights.
grrr
ok, sorry, rant over
Nope. 31 random tracks from March 2010 got scrobbled.
And my last hundreds of plays didn't even get their play counts updated in itunes, much less on lastfm.
Yeah, I'll see what the ipod diagnostics say. And if there's anything in the scrobbler. Thanks.
Karg, I did not know that you could scrobble after detaching the iPod.