Cartoon by Gemini AI
In my worldly travels I have visited countries with different levels of involvement with the mainstream tourist trade. It is notable that the attitude of street vendors is indicative of the length of their experience with mainstream tourists; the less the contact, the better the manners of the salespeople. For example, I’ve been to small Caribbean islands where it’s all smiles and chat and ‘have a nice day, mon,’ whether you buy anything or not. The beach in Puerto Vallarta is a different matter; civic officials monitor the situation and enforce good manners. For the souk in Cairo, you almost need a stick to beat them away, but they’ve been dealing with tourists since Napoleon’s day. At the Coliseum in Rome, chances are they aren’t selling anything, they are looking for something to steal. Of course, they’ve been fleecing tourists for a couple of millennia.
When we were in Bangkok in the early nineties, we noticed a half-and-half situation. Some sellers were more polite and friendly, but a few were quite high-pressure. I doubt if it’s the same now.
I blame the tourists. The street vendors are only trying to make a living. They start out thinking that if they are friendly, they will make more sales. But as time goes on, they discover that some tourists are willing to allow themselves to be pressured, even bullied, into buying. These sellers are poor people. If it works, they’ll do it. So vendors get pushier, and tourists begin to accept it, and everything gets worse. And then I don’t go back; I move on to less-touristy destinations.
But it isn’t only third-world street vendors that work this way. Canadian tradespeople present their problems as well.
The Furnace
I bought a new furnace about a dozen years ago. I checked around, found a good price, made the contract. Everything went smoothly, but the actual installation was done by a sub-contractor. That might have raised a warning light, but it didn’t seem unusual.
The original contractor said we had to have his people do the annual inspection in order to validate the warrantee. Again, not great, but not unusual. Then the upselling started. I went for the first level; I’d never had the ducts cleaned, so I opted for that. This kid wandered around the house with a hand-held leaf blower and shoved all the dust back down the vents.
By the time the five-year warrantee was finished, so was my patience. It told the man I would no longer need his services, and I thought that was that.
But I was on his books, and that was what counted. He called me every year for the next five years, playing all the usual tricks, like telling me that he’d done my inspection last year, and should we stick to the same schedule? I kept telling him, at increasing levels of firmness, that I wanted nothing more to do with him.
It ended up a race whether the contractor or the furnace he installed would give up first. The furnace outlasted him, but only by about two years.
The Eavestroughs
I usually do my own home upgrades, but I was never happy with the job I did using ten-foot sections of gutter glued together. Every two or three years it seems I’m up there doing repairs to a leaking join or three. I’ve always said that if I ever did another upgrade, continuous gutters would be my first choice. But I have no idea what they might cost. My favourite AI on Google suggests my house would be somewhere between $1,500 and $10,000, which is not much help. But I’ve always been leery about getting on the books of another online tradesman.
Finally, my curiosity got the better of me and I chose a company that was advertising a “free quote on line.” I moved in carefully, but they seemed to be leading in the right direction, asking all the right questions: length required, size of gutter, material choice, height of house, etc.
Of course, at the end they asked for an email address. But by then I’d put so much effort into it, I said, “Oh, what the heck” (Just like the sucker is supposed to) and sent it to them.
In the next two days I received an email, a text message, and three phone calls thanking me for signing up and asking me to schedule my “free, in-home appraisal.”
Deja vu all over again.
So, I answered the email, stating my lack of interest in having the work done at this stage, and my expectation of a ballpark email response. I answered the next phone call and told the nice young lady firmly and politely that I had made my interest clear in an email, and to either respond with what I wanted or not to call me again. She asked me politely to restate what I wanted, which I did, and she agreed.
I have not heard back since. It’s ‘wait and see’ time.
Digital Games Ads
When I play a game on my phone, I expect an ad now and again. It’s part of the understood contract. Just like old-fashioned network TV, I use the service for free if I watch the ad. But there are different levels. A few years ago, the ads were all five seconds long, and at the worst, sometimes you got two in a row. That has crept up as time went on. Now it’s often ten or even fifteen seconds before you get the little “x” that allows you to escape the ad (if you can find it). Worse than that, some of them don’t allow you out, but take you back to a previous screen. This, in my opinion, breaks the implicit contract, and I consider it my right to avoid them. I click out of the game, double-click on my home screen and swipe that app off. Then I open it again, and the ad is gone.
The Bottom Line
It’s a sad fact of life that some of the people we meet are not as nice as we’d like them to be, and people who are trying to sell us something are sometimes willing to push a bit to see if it works. The only way to deal with this sort of salesmanship is to be firm (and polite) from the beginning. Many of them pick up on this and will treat you the way you want to be treated.
And the best way to deal with trouble is to follow the primary rule my karate instructor taught me; don’t put yourself in a dangerous situation in the first place.