Want to know how to piss people off? Send them marketing crap for deals they can’t use. Take this individual. The title of the blog post should probably not be reproduced here, but the basic idea is that unless you can offer TV, Internet and phone from Verizon for $79.99 a month — don’t mail stuff to people saying you can.

A very pissed off consumer writes:

I get these direct mail pieces from Verizon several times a week. I know…everyone hates junk mail, but here’s the thing: Verizon doesn’t provide FiOS TV at my address (the address they sent this piece of mail to). Furthermore, they will not offer the same deal on their non-premium [read: inferior] services.

In other words, there is no way – none whatsoever – to get TV, internet, and phone from verizon for $79.99 per month (for the first 6 months) – and yet these ads have been clogging my mailbox in the month since I moved here. When I went online to look into this deal, the first thing the website prompted me to do was to enter my address (the address printed on the other side of that piece of mail). Based upon that information, the website was able to tell me that I could not take advantage of this deal. Does Verizon not have an internet connection? Couldn’t they do this themselves before wasting paper, ink, and another previous piece of my sanity?

This is unacceptable, not only from the perspective of the consumer, but for environmental reasons as well. How many thousands (millions?) of these heavy card-stock, two-page brochures are being sent to households where Verizon cannot provide this service? Get your sh*t together, Verizon. All you’ve managed to do is alienate me so that I will no longer consider FiOS…if it is ever available to me.

You know, I doubt this was the effect Verizon was going for.

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