It's only past if it was due

A long time ago, Geoff Pullum wrote a wonderful little rant on junk mail including utterly specious directives to the mailman:

POSTMASTER: If undeliverable, please process following applicable Postal Regulations

Text like this is, of course, intended to make the document look more "official", as though it carried some kind of legal standing, when in fact its' inclusion changes nothing.

Yesterday, Mrs. SC received a similar -- but considerably nastier -- advertisement, inviting her to subscribe to a magazine entitled "Internal Medicine Coding Alert". The advertisement came in the form of an invoice, suggesting that she owed $297, less a $50 "professional discount" -- note that from the link in the previous sentence, she could get a bigger discount on the exact same print subscription simply by ordering online. But the appearance of an invoice is nothing new -- SC gets ads for all sorts of magazines set up to look as though he placed an order and it was a bill. What's new and highly distasteful is the abusive way in which the "invoice" was designed to appear as though the recipient was delinquent on a legitimate bill.

Below the list of charges was the text:

**URGENT ATTENTION REQUIRED** We're surprised we haven't received your payment. Please send payment today to secure this special preferred reader discounted price.

Even more obnoxiously, the total at the bottom of the statement is listed as follows:

TOTAL PAYMENT PAST DUE: $247.00

"Past due" is, of course, a phrase with terrifying ramifications in a society where small swings in your credit rating can have thousands of dollars' worth of consequences. That the "invoice" then also contains, in extremely small print, the disclaimer "This is not an invoice", does not make the use of legalistic language any more humorous. Certain terms carry considerable force merely by being mentioned, and when that force turns out to be illegitimately invoked, the consequence is inevitably going to be distrust. It's hard to believe that the lost goodwill was really worth the possibility of an extra subscription.

Comments

[ACW]

This touches on a hobby-horse of mine. It's a simple concern, but I don't think I can phrase it concisely enough for a comment and stay coherent. I'll try for terseness at the possible expense of coherency.

Cooperation can evolve even between 'competitors' (like the participants in a market); see Axelrod's seminal "The evolution of cooperation". But Axelrod's scenario requires that interactions be iterative; there should be a high probability that participants will interact again in the future. Unfortunately, in very large markets, this re-interaction is diluted to the point where it is no longer important. The advantages of cooperation diminish, and what's left is pure cutthroat scrambling for resources. The scammers perceive a tiny chance of scaring Mrs. SC into sending in $247. Would you say that it's as low as 1 in 1000? $247 more than pays for 1000 bulk-mail postings. And the goodwill cost of the 999 failures is zero, because the varmints have no interest in interacting with Mrs. SC again once they have taken her money (and forwarded the actual subscription cost to the publishers).

[Semantic Compositions]

That sounds like a fascinating article; I think I'll have to go find it.

For the record, though, in this case the people who sent the mail are the publishers. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Your point still stands, though; all it takes is 1 in 1000 (or something in that range) to make it worthwhile. It's too bad that they've gone about it this way; if my wife wasn't so annoyed by how she was treated in this case, she would have seriously considered subscribing, because it's actually a quite useful magazine.

[speedwell]

To the best of my knowledge and belief, this is an illegal practice when I was a secretary who handled mail, and it is illegal now. Some moron lost a huge amount of money for defrauding old ladies with this same gambit. I think that the small-print disclaimer is not enough to pass muster.