Home

Let's say you run a business. Would you deliberately annoy your customers? Probably not.

But strangely enough, many companies go out of their way to irritate people who buy their products. Maybe bored executives just want a bit of fun at our expense.

Consider the ingenious method they have devised to intensify the stress we feel trying to get a problem resolved in a discussion with, say, a telephone representative of a credit card account. After you have pressed in or shouted your account number three times, and waited eight minutes on hold listening to whiney saxophone music, you finally reach a person. Dwayne. You then spend five minutes trying to convince him that you really did send a check in time to cover your card bill (you really didn't). Dwayne thinks: "Yeah, sure you did," and refuses to take the $25 late charge off your account. Then, as you sit there steaming -- here's the clever twist -- Dwayne says, cheerfully, "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

It has to be a joke, right? Similarly, how else to explain a manufacturer packaging an item so you can't extract it from the packaging? Yes, the plastic blister pack. Sure, the tough plastic protects the goods, but I have seen people with a new phone or oven thermometer attack the package with knife or scissors before giving up and having to cut their purchase free with metal shears.

There are many more examples of customer hassles of course, but I thought you might be interested in how they are developed. (They are not accidental.) Here, for instance, is a case study often used at graduate business schools.

Scene: Marketing Department meeting. Vice President speaking. "OK, people, I want ideas. It's getting boring around here just fielding complaints about reliability and service. We need a new way to score a few chuckles at customer expense. I see a hand. Yes?"

"Sir, we can put stickers on our products that the customer can't peel off. Or maybe they can get the paper part off, but not the smear of glue. They'll try to scrape it off with their thumbnail or a knife, or use soap and water or a spray cleaner, or alcohol or paint thinner, but nothing will work. They have to run out and spend four bucks on a can of commercial glue-remover, some smelly stuff with scary warnings all over it, like 'Keep Away From Children,' or 'Combustible Mixture,' or 'Use Only In Well Ventilated Area.' Then they spray on this gunk, which naturally runs all over their nice new candy dish. The sticker comes off, but now they have to scrub the dish in hot soapy water to remove the sticker-remover."

"That's brilliant! How about you, there?"

"We can make removal of the sticker even more annoying if it contains useless information, like 'Quality Inspected For Your Satisfaction'."

"Wow. Great work, both of you -- but I should have expected wonderful things from the team that came up with putting number stickers on fruit."

And speaking of those fruit stickers, I am happy to report that the days of having to gouge out a piece of your peach with a thumbnail to get the sticker off are themselves numbered. The most important information on the sticker is the PLU, or Price Lookup Code. This is the number that makes it unnecessary for the checkout kid to be able to tell parsley from parsnips, much less have to know the names of the 10 varieties of apples in the produce department. Here's the breakthrough: some distributors are now using a laser to burn the PLU, the item name, and other information directly into the skin of the produce! They are tattooing the fruit.

Not to worry. The government says the process is safe. The laser cauterizes the skin as it inscribes the information, so it remains airtight. The problem I see is that the industry won't be content with just a PLU and an item name. There will be used-car advertisements etched into the green peppers, pie recipes on the apples, or an NPR membership promotion on the organic pears.

I'm sure you have your own pet ways companies annoy you. Keep in mind that more and better annoyances are coming. Ingenious people are out there.

Bernard Jacks lives in Marlboro.