Bah Humbug?

Is it just me or is it annoying when companies that you have very little interaction with use Christmas as a reason to spam you? For instance, several poker rooms have emailed me in the last couple of weeks to wish me a Happy Holiday Season. Why? I’ve never even made a deposit on the site.

I’ve also had several message boards and other random eCommerce sites email a special Holiday Season email as well.

But the kicker is . . . not one of them bothered to offer me anything. Hell, I’ll give you some props for sending me a coupon or deposit bonus or something but to just randomly spam every single person in your database with a message that has no value seems . . . well . . . disingenuous.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think they should attempt to commercialize holidays like Christmas and New Year any more than they already do but I’m not a good customer of these sites. In fact, on many I haven’t even visited them in years. And they’ve never sent me a holiday greeting during any of those previous years. It’s sort of like getting a holiday card from a dentist that you haven’t visited in a decade all of a sudden out of the blue. Instead of inspiring feelings of goodwill to all men, you just sort of look at it and say “WTF is this?”

What happened to all those years when you didn’t send me a greeting? Should I assume that you weren’t wishing me goodwill those years? Why can’t you be bothered to send me a birthday greeting?

I hate to sound like such a bah humbug guy but it just makes me wonder why they even bother. Is this the newest in passive-aggressive marketing? Did they sit around thinking of their holiday marketing campaign and draw a blank?

Whatever it is, I really don’t get any warm and fuzzies getting random well wishes from random websites.

Photocred to reizzil