Are You a Sucker for Impossibly Great Deals? I Fell for One |
“There’s one born every minute.”
What exactly is it that's born every minute? American showman P.T .Barnum said it was "a sucker." We might be kinder now and refer to them as "vulnerable" consumers or "under-informed" buyers.
Barnum considered "suckers" to be the most gullible customers, the pushovers, the poor saps drawn to bait-and-switch deals. It’s folks who believe too readily that what they’re being told is true and are too easily persuaded that they’re being treated fairly by a stranger who will unquestionably give them the best possible of all options.
Barnum lived from 1810 to 1891 and was hugely successful. Are we any more cautious now when evaluating offers than Barnum's pre-Civil War audiences were, or have the terms “sucker” and “customer” now become synonymous?
For those working in the higher echelons of business, are patrons, shoppers, and fans so conflated into one giant blob of a dithering, blithering, ignorant, unworthy client mass that we can be treated with the kind of contempt once reserved for the naive newcomer, or the hayseed, or the ignorant young person traveling alone?
Was it that profound lack of respect that provided a large international hotel chain permission to send out ads saying, in effect, “Great rooms available at prices you won’t believe over the holidays!” when, in fact, there were no rooms available on those dates or at those prices?
Is this why so many people now believe that “customer service” is as much of an oxymoron as “jumbo shrimp,” "political........