Why would you send me a letter?
Yesterday I started going through some of my FIFO LIFO snail mail queue (mostly mailings from businesses I didn’t have time to look at since I had gotten married and we were looking for a house—so I didn’t open anything that didn’t have a live first class stamp). Out of the entire box, all but one letter I opened was junk mail. But the one letter that wasn’t was from Hertz dated Oct 2008 that says I owe them $30.00. I had rented a car from them to get some warranty work done on the Mazda and Norco Mazda was supposed to pay the bill, but Hertz said Norco Mazda failed to pay so it was my responsibility to pay (because it was in the agreement they said). Now it’s too bad I didn’t open their letter earlier, but it is businesses that have conditioned me to think that letters in the mail are junk. So I sent Hertz an email to ask if Norco had ended up paying it and if not I would send them a check. I got a reply back saying they don’t know because their system only keeps 6 months of rental history so they can’t look up my rental number! 6 months!! How do they pass their financial audits?
This should be a reminder for businesses that you should not send important communication by the same method you send advertisements. This is like putting a very special important needle in a haystack. Some people may devote their entire lives going through the mail they receive—but that is not my lifestyle. Email is the best way to get a hold of me, mostly because filters work so well. A good example is I had a credit card compromised so Amazon wasn’t able to process a payment. They notified me via email and I was promptly able to fix the problem.
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