Now we just need the technology so the phone automatically does all the answering...

yes?

Yes!

I apologize. Telemarketers are no worse than pedophiles.

After all, after you interrupt thei dinner, ablutions, or coitus, at least you have the decency to ask if you've called at a convenient time. Sorry, that makes it all much less annoying.

And the argument about people who need the job is just laughable in my opinion. No job opportunity justifies annoying other people in that nasty way. And yes; I really don't care at all about marketing companies and the people that work there. I've seen too many ads being forced down my throat against my will and will do ANYthing to sabotage them...

You are one opinionated long winded scumbag. "CLICK!"

Can you hear me now?

But a reasonable person would see that making an unsolicited call to someone is an unmitigated nuisance. Telling yourself (and us) that it's ok because you're calling your own customers, trying to keep them happy, doesn't make it any better. In fact, if any company that does business with me calls me out of the blue, they'd better have a good reason for it or I will no longer be their customer.

-- “It’s not a worthy mission, and it’s making you seem dense.”
---- Respectfully, that’s not for you to decide.

But she's absolutely right, on both counts.

And now, MrP is apparently gone (we'll see for how long; most telemarketers never are for very long), and we have Gunner Sykes to fill in for him.

That's all there is to it.

Who said they do? No one. However many (notice how I don't generalize there like you do) do appreciate being contacted, especially so since we ask if they have time and can return at a better time. Heck, that method is much better in the long run both for us and the customer.

"Telemarketers are lower on the scale than pedophiles - just learn to accept it, MrPumpernickel. Only then can you be truly at peace with yourself."

Wow, I hope you never have children.

"I just realized, Mr. P, that you have roped us all into an online version of an endless, mind-numbing, unwelcome sell. Well played, sir."

Unwelcome? Whoa whoa whoa! Don't you pin that on me, it was (all) your own decision to come here, to read and to comment.

Either way, I'm done with this now, I've said pretty much all I wanted to say. Happy continuation of this discussion if you decide to do so. Ta ta!

I can't believe people in Sweden love being interrupted during dinner, ablutions, or coitus to be informed of exciting new opportunities for their cell phone plan.

Telemarketers are lower on the scale than pedophiles - just learn to accept it, MrPumpernickel. Only then can you be truly at peace with yourself.

I do not tolerate telemarketing calls. Again, I am not one to tell off the poor sod that has to work there and make the call, but I will have fun with them because it's the nicest I can be when someone is calling me with a useless phone call.

When I lived in the US, I was one of the first on the do not call list, and any abuses of that were reported. Why? Because I only give out my phone number to people I want to hear from. My home is my sanctuary. I don't want anyone to disrupt the peaceful, personal world I have carved out for myself unless that person is a welcome disruption, such as a friend or family member.

Telemarketing is rude by its very concept. Of all the things a person can do on a phone, next to hanging up on someone, it is the rudest thing you can do. Calling someone to sell them something, push for donations, or take surveys is akin to walking into a stranger's bathroom while they are on the toilet and striking up a conversation. This is why I make it a point to never buy from, or give to a charity that uses these tactics.

"You have made the mistaken assumption that I as a consumer welcome calls from people I don’t know who are interested in transacting business with me while I am in my own home. I do not."

Yes, YOU do not, you're one person though. I cannot go into a call assuming that the person either wants or do not want to "transact business" while at home. That's why you ask them if they have time and perhaps say quickly what it's about. Hence it's up to anyone to make the decision. If people who call you don't do that then yes, they are rude. To repeat, you CANNOT assume either or. But yes, I'd wager that you're correct that all telemarketers know quite well the stigma their profession entails and that they can be seen as rude regardless of how well they carry themselves.

Much of telemarketing in Sweden anyway is done to keep customers more than it is to get new ones. A customer which you can make happy and keep is worth 10 new customers, easily. Let's make a hypotethical situation: I call a customer and say that their current cellphone plan is old, outdated and expensive and that they can switch over to a new cheaper one. If we hadn't done that the customer might have found a cheaper deal at another company. Because of our call the customer is happy and stays with our company, it's a win win situation.

nobody, to you it's wasted to me it's well spent. I enjoy discussing these things. I'm sure to many people all the time spent doing anything that they don't agree with is a waste of time as well.

"And you will simply never win the argument about whether it’s okay to call people in their homes."

I don't think I will either, but that's not the point. The point is trying to get people to see that there are more than one side to the coin. They see, for the most case, only their own side and fail to see the other person as well. Hence why so many people with such ease can call telemarketers such horrible and insulting things.

"The fact is that telemarketers are, to the American mind, the absolute lowest form of human life."

Wow! I might've saved that comment for murderers, or rapists, but hey!

"It’s not a worthy mission, and it’s making you seem dense."

Respectfully, that's not for you to decide.

It's great that you seem to live in some telemarketing eden where everything is respectful and there are candy canes growing on trees.

But it is basically irrelevant to this discussion. What you describe as your job, your tactics, your ethic, is not the case in the U.S., not the climate here. Unless you understand the American climate of telemarketing, you are really wasting your energy.

And you will simply never win the argument about whether it's okay to call people in their homes. The people in those homes are the authority on whether that feels okay to them, and they have spoken. Get over it.

The fact is that telemarketers are, to the American mind, the absolute lowest form of human life. I can understand how that fact would bother you, but you are better off carrying on with your life rather than behaving as if it is somehow your special calling to change the way telemarketers are perceived and treated. It's not a worthy mission, and it's making you seem dense. Move on.

I used to actually answer to telemarketers and said "no thanks" and opted out of everything under the sun.

My reward for being so polite? I was removed from THEIR list and promptly added to every associate under the sun's list.

Nothing like being able to confirm you have a live person on the end of the line. I now get telemarketing calls from morning to night. My answering machine (max of 35 message) will fill completely in 3 days if I don't answer the phone. All telemarketing/soliciting calls. I don't really blame the telemarketers though. Who I really blame is Bank of America, who sold my contact information out in the first place and it continues to spread from there.

The telemarketer, to not think of himself as rude, must assume that all those who are not on such a list have in effect let it be known beforehand that they do not mind interruptions of their homelife. Obviously this is not the case. So telemarketers, on some level, know they are being potentially rude. What percentage of callers does a telemarketer think he has irritated by his calls? Surely a lower percentage than those who are actually irritated; after all, many people can hide their feelings, even from telemarketers. But call it 50%; a telemarketer irritates 50% of those he calls. Does a telmarketer balance the realization that he's been rude to 50% of the people he's called by believing that he's done a real service (or at least hasn't irritated) the other 50%?

Or does it have to even be 50%? Surely if 10%, or 5%, or even 1% of those I the telemarketer call realize some kind of benefit (and by that I mean end up giving the my company money), surely that's worth the rudeness the other 90 or 99% of those cold-called have to live through. By giving this 1% a valuable service, the frustration that all the other people who did not want the valuable service (who did not even want to *know* about the valuable service) go through is worth it.

And it's not like the irritation and frustration amount to much, anyway. Several seconds in a day, at most. Unless one counts all the *other* calls by other telemarketers that eat up time, and the amount of time after calls that people spend trying to push that irritated feeling into the background. But I am not my brother's keeper, so I can't really be concerned about the additive irritation my call creates. It's just not my problem.

And if I didn't call, if telemarketing didn't exist, how would potential customers know about my product? How would potential customers even know they have a *need* for the product? Is it even ethical to allow a rube, I mean a potential customer, to walk around, carefree, completely ignorant of the fact that there's this great product out there that would help him greatly in some way that he hasn't even thought about?
Because traditional advertising of products in the media just doesn't flush out the rubes, I mean potential customers, nearly as effectively as it used to. And it's so much cheaper to have a machine interrupt homelife in a zillion homes, looking for those who didn't even know they were lost, than it is to use traditional advertising; so much cheaper. And those lowered costs can eventually be potentially passed to the ignorant customers that we find over the phone. So you can see that any supposed rudeness derived from my unwanted interruption of people's lives, while regrettable, is vital to the overall economy. Also world peace. So it's win-win!

And that's how cognitive dissonance works.

I happen to be a bagger, and I get in trouble with my manager if i happen to do something as ridiculous as putting something like cans of soup on the eggs. Grocery stores offer bagging as a courtesy, and you can choose not to have someone bag if you want. And what the hell does being a stranger have to do with anything? Of course he/she is a stranger, it's not like you're best buds with all the employees at the grocery store, or at most places with which you do your business.

Way to be a Hypocrite. And, really, don't try to change it around to make it seem like that wasn't the message you put out, because it most certainly was, there's no other way one could interpret that.

Not trying to pick a fight here, but evidently you cared enough to sit down and make a reply. You sort of made my defense for me, thank you.