| Comment Number: | OL-113439 |
| Received: | 1/10/2005 11:36:14 AM |
| Organization: | The Northeast Harbor Inn, Inc. |
| Commenter: | Elizabeth White |
| State: | ME |
| Subject: | Trade Regulation Rule on Telemarketing Sales |
| Title: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| CFR Citation: | 16 CFR Part 310 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
As a small business, we don't have the time or the staff to handle unwanted telephone solicitations.Companies with whom we are already doing business can notify us by mail, at no extra postage and little expense, of special offers when they bill us every month -- we do not want them to call us. Before the days of the no-call list, we used to record the name of every company that called to solicit our business -- telling them to remove us from their call list and informing them that we blackball all businesses that use telemarketing, because it so enrages us to have those interruptions and loss of our time. Automatic dialers often quit after a few rings, so after you have interupted what you are doing, or put your own customer on hold to go run for the ringing phone -- there is no one there and then their machine redials and the exercise has to be repeated again and again -- and if you do answer, you can't tell the machine never to call again. When we receive prerecorded messages to call a company we are already doing business with, about some great new offer -- we never call back.Why reward annoyance calls?Many small businesses are hurt, not helped, by direct telepone advertising.It causes interruptions (I have lost sales) and loss of efficiency, and wastes precious time. Business people should have the right not to bo bothered by these annoyance calls, if they so choose.(Also bad are unsolicited faxes -- you end up paying for the advertisers' use of your paper and ink.As it is, solicitors often use the toll free numbers of those they solicit, making the receiving party pay for the annoyance call).The present nocall situation isn't perfect, but it is much better than the bad old days. (Some argument about direct dialing machines saving on outsourcing makes little sense -- the machines don't represent the Americans making calls instead of the foreign workers, and the problem and issue of outsourcing needs to be dealt with on its own and not used as some kind of rationale by direct marketers to promote their cause.) I have the right not to receive annoyance calls, and I consider all unsolicited sales calls -- from companies I do business with as well as from companies with no relationship to ours -- to be annoyance calls. Large telemarketing firms, and large companies with telemarketing divisions, may have a lot more clout with the FTC than an individual small business like ours, but I don't want to receive unsolicited sales calls from anyone or, especially, from any machine, whether or not there is already some business relationahip with our company.