121–130 of 144 posts
HelloFresh seems to be optimising for user count above all else (incl profit). They keep offering their big -40% loss leader promos to people that cancelled. Must be costing them an ungodly amount.
There's no way they are losing money at 40% off unless they are doing something unreasonably bad.
I receive a lot of physical mail from HelloFresh and there's no clear way to opt-out. I've never (willingly or knowingly) signed up to their service or any marketing bits.
Buy a "return to sender" stamp, apply it to the mail and give it back to the post carrier.
You can't. It doesn't work. (USPS) Most of the junk mail we receive is presort, bulk rate, etc., and there's no return service for it. The letter carrier will reject it and give it back to you. You can throw it out. You can write to the sender (email/post) and request removal from their list.
One problem I get, is that I've "gone paperless" everywhere possible, yet some entities still insist on sending paper mail in certain circumstances. These are very important bits of correspondence, and I can't seem to get across the message that I don't want their paper shit. In one case I've received physical membership cards, and one of them was stolen from my mailbox (somewhere after Informed Delivery scanned it, even.) But they can't administratively prevent these mailings from being triggered.
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It’s funny how the opt out mechanisms are the buggiest part of all the systems in a company. And the slowest. I had a message the other day: “We will try our best to unsubscribe you within 30 days”. Well, don’t strain yourselves
What, you think a database can just, like, delete a row, just like that? Don't be ridiculous.
HelloFresh also sends marketing snail mail if they have your postal address. The market starts to be crowded and they are obviously aggressively marketing their product. We'll see if that can last. It's crazy that they got $367 million in total funding for a recipe and ingredients (meal kits) subscription business but they apparently now have 6 billion euros in revenue so it seems to work.
The worst part is that (at least in Canada) this isn't illegal. Unsolicited calls, texts and email are illegal but snail mail is fine. It seems that all form of communication should have the same rules, but the laws are special cases. Probably if they start messaging you via WhatsApp that is also fine.
Man I wish no private corp was allowed to contact you without an opt-in. Would really make email useful again....
It’s already the case with GDPR. (B2B spam is different) If you get a random sales/marketing email, you have the right to find out where they got your details from and where did they get your consent to email you.
This doesn't matter much when emails are sold and sent from outside the EU/UK. This would probably need to be a protocol-level adjustment to ensure consent before contact.
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The worst part is that (at least in Canada) this isn't illegal. Unsolicited calls, texts and email are illegal but snail mail is fine. It seems that all form of communication should have the same rules, but the laws are special cases. Probably if they start messaging you via WhatsApp that is also fine.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, the postal system is subsidized by spam. Essentially spam is the most profitable aspect of the service, and so it's endorsed at the expense of everything else. Since the sender pays costs for postal mail, it's completely different than SMS or emails.
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The trouble is you may end up with transactional emails in your spam folder.
Indeed. If someone is going to argue credibly for treating everything from commercial sources as spam then they also need to explain how businesses can provide any information they are actively required to provide to their customers either by law or by whatever method the customer is using to pay them. In general the merchants have no say in this and the penalties for failing to provide the information can be far mor…
Same thing with crying wolf and all that.
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All the GDPR guidance says it should be opt-in (not pre-checked) eg: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
Given how commonplace that dark pattern is, I don't think our government agencies do a great job at enforcing GDPR.
The vast majority of them aren’t compliant (the GDPR bans tricking/annoying people into granting consent), but are able to proliferate because it’s not enforced anywhere near enough.
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I just mark all marketing emails as spam now. Since I never want them, I can't have opted in to it so it's spam. Seems very effective at having my email provider forward all future emails from them to spam and hopefully tarnishes their sender trust rating a little.
The trouble is you may end up with transactional emails in your spam folder.
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Regulators typically start with a small fine and then if the behavior continues, fines and penalties increase exponentially. Having worked inside a number of companies who've received fines, the ones that intend to continue operating change their behavior immediately and install controls to avoid this escalation path. The obvious exception is when the behavior change creates an existential threat to the core business…
This just incentivizes companies to do this behaviour until their first warning. If you want companies to follow the rules from the get-go you better make sure that your first fine makes them regret ignoring the rules. If you make the incentives to ignore the rules until they get caught the first time then companies will do that. HelloFresh got huge numbers of subscribers based on this strategy for pennies. Even if t…