We all know that one of the trendy things right now is to have all of your paper bills canceled and enroll for online bills, automatic payments, online bill payments and other things like that. All nice and good. What bothers me is that one of the reasons most of the banks, credit cards, utility providers etc. which encourage you to do so use the environment as one of the reasons (most of the times one of the most important one). I don’t have anything against that. As a matter of fact I do agree that the more of us would choose to go paperless, the more we would contribute to the conservation of our environment. (Why I personally don’t do it, it’s a different story and I’ll write about it some other time).

What’s my problem, than? I’ll tell you what my problem is. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but another thing that’s becoming trendy (or so I think since I’ve only seen it happening in the past year) is for your credit card companies to send you checks to use for whatever reason you wish (to pay other cards, to pay bills, to transfer some money into your bank account etc.). Overall quite a good idea. I don’t know if you’ve gotten any of them (I believe you would need to have a balance lower than 50% of your credit limit to get them). These checks usually have an expiration date, meaning you can only use them by a certain date, which in my case, on most batches I received, was about three months from the date I got them.

And now we’re getting to the problem (finally); two weeks later I’ll receive another batch. And two weeks after that, another one. And so on and so forth. I mean here you are encouraging me to go paperless to save the trees, yet you don’t even wait for the expiration date on the checks you sent me just two weeks ago to come and you send me another batch. Absolutely wasted paper. And needless to say they don’t send only the checks. A bunch of other junk advertising comes along with them (don’t even get me started on that one).

As I said, I do believe the whole idea with the checks is a good one - you never know when you need them. But there’s two things these banks could do (either one of them or both of them in the same time). Either keep your mouth shut (so to speak) and don’t try to make me feel guilty about ruining the environment with my paper bills, when you yourself couldn’t care less about it and when the actual reason for which you prefer your customers to go paperless is because it cuts down on your costs, thus increasing your profits. Or/And have a software that tells you the expiration date of the last checks you sent me and, in the same time, whether I have used any of them so far or not. And have that software tell you when to send me the new checks: when I have only a couple of the previous ones left or when there’s about a week or so left before they expire (whichever comes first). Don’t even tell me you can’t have something like that (’cause I’ll take it as if you think I’m stupid). As for whether this would be cost effective or not, well… I guess it’s less expensive for you to waste the trees. But then I go back to my problem: stop trying to sell me paperless on environmental reasons.

In the same area of wasted paper, here’s another thing that bugs me. I have a checking account. Attached to that account is my debit card. When I opened the account, the bank representative offered me to have that card work like a rewards credit card (you know the deal: you buy on credit you get something in return). In my case we’re talking about United Airlines miles. Considering I’ve never had a rewards card of any kind so far, I accepted the deal (which costs me about $25/year without me ever being able to use those miles - they’ll expire before I have enough of them) just for the heck of it.

Ever since then, I receive, from the guys at United, credit card offers. And they’re linked with that debit card I mentioned. Each and every one of the offers comes with an updated balance of my miles together with a big fat number of free ones I could get if I apply for this credit card. Of course these offers have expiration dates as well. But do you think they wait for those offers to expire before sending me new ones? You got it: NO. And just like the case with the checks, new ones come in, literally, every other week. Sometimes the envelopes just sit there on my desk for weeks and weeks just pilling up. I don’t even open them anymore.

And you’re telling me you care about the environment? And you’re trying to sell me paperless to save the trees? Are you freaking kidding me?

I know what many of you are going to say: Dude, it’s just marketing. Everyone knows these things are going on and you just have to live with them. Just let it go.

And I ask you: Why? Why should I let it go?

You can rest assured I’m not as naive as to even imagine I could have anything changed about it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to take a few minutes of my time to express my disgust with these companies and folks who would do anything in the name of the good ol’ buck.

As for the fact that is nothing but plain marketing, I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of person who believes that there’s a limit to everything. And if you see that your prospective customer is just not interested, it’s time to give up. Or if you just have to keep on trying, at least stop the harassment. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it is: harassment. Don’t do it so often anymore. Give the guy (or girl) a break before you come knocking on the door again. It’s true they might have changed their mind in the mean time, but stop expecting this to happen within a few days. It won’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Are Ya Kidding Me?, Commentary, Economics, Environment, Things that Drive Me Nuts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.