Nothing like a little outrage to wake you up!

[telophase]

Shutterfly has just earned a nastygram with profanity from me to their customer service email, as they sent me this email this morning:



I usually use Winkflash for my online photo printing needs, and will stay there for the forseeable future. The only reason I opened a Shutterfly account is to create a photo blanket for my mother-in-law for Mother's Day, and there's plenty of other photo sites that do that, some cheaper (*coughCostcocough*).

I'm wondering if this is a promotion sent out to a portion of a mailing list in error, or if they bought my email address from a specific mailing list somewhere. (If I get pregnant again, I need to remember the Gmail trick of adding "+something" to the first part of the address--it'll still come to my inbox and will tell me exactly who is selling my info.)

Comments

[snarp]

Holy fuck.

[telophase]

Yup. I'm waiting for a reply before deleting my account there, under the vague impression that they might want to call it up or something, or that I'll get a better response if they think they might get more of my money.

Mind you, I haven't actually taken a look to see if it's one of those places where I can delete my account.

[jinian]

You can always change your name to "Account Deleted" and change your email address to a guaranteed bounce. That's what I did with Amazon lo these many years ago.

[telophase]

I will keep that in mind in case I need it, thanks!

[yhlee]

I'm so sorry.

[telophase]

I've heard that lots and lots of people for whom it wasn't intended (including single men) got it. I rather hope their customer service department is blowing up right now.

[loligo]

Yeah, I hope that someone there is having a deservedly bad day.

[gaudior]

Oh, fuck them. :(

[movingfinger]

Made the news.

Twitter flittering too apparently.

[kore]

Oh, sharp!


Also Shutterfly: WTFFF

[camwyn]

Yeah, it was definitely a mistake on their part- it was on io9 yesterday. It went out to a lot of their users when it was supposed to be better targeted. They got a lot of angry messages from people who'd lost children or couldn't have children, and a number of very confused men who had no idea why Shutterfly seemed to think they'd gained Zeus's powers of producing Dionysus overnight.

[cschells.livejournal.com]

I got it too, and it pissed me off as well--although I don't feel as raw about that stuff these days... A few days ago I rediscovered a very angry email I sent to a formula company about five years ago because they sent me a "helpful" box of formula samples and new parent info about a year after my last miscarriage. The lady who replied was actually very apologetic and promised to take me off their list immediately. I would guess that Snapfish is going to get a lot of push back. I'm thinking it's a mistake.

ETA: errr, Shutterfly

[telophase.livejournal.com]

In that case, most likely a mistake.

My insurance company called me last week to tell me they'd like me to sign up for a special maternity thing. I was thinking "You've got the HOSPITAL RECORDS! Someone, somewhere, should have LOOKED AT THEM!" The caller was apologetic, but I reflexively hung up on her when she asked for my personal info (confirming birth date and address), then realized a split second too late that she probably needed that before she could update my account, so I might get another call from them.

[sleary.livejournal.com]

Apparently a number of people for whom this was inappropriate, including quite a few single men, received it anyway. I'm sorry you had to put up with that in your inbox. I hope their PR people get sacked.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if their mailing list vendor is Mailchimp or something like that, which gives you the ability to split lists up and send campaigns to portions of a list. I can see an error if they split it up into "new parents" and "not new parents" and then sent it to the wrong list portion. Although it still makes me wonder where they're getting the parent/not parent info from, if that's the case...

[sleary.livejournal.com]

Or worse, they just sent it to everyone without thinking about how heartless it would be to someone who'd lost a child or a mother.

It's easy to screw up list segments; I did it all the time when I was managing the chancellor's newsletter through Bronto. But it's also really easy to use the "send a test message" feature before you send out the real campaign.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I just got the official corporate-line apology response to my complaint, saying it's been escalated to the marketing department and that they're hard at work making sure it doesn't happen again.

The possibility of screwing up is one of the reasons why I've never split the ConDFW list into segments to test different approaches, and just do a different approach with each newsletter to see what works. :D

[cschells.livejournal.com]

I had a nurse in the OB's office hand me prenatal vitamins while I was miscarrying--people are such bozos! It gets easier, though, despite the world's way of extending the misery...

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I think they just sent out a mass mailing: I got it at my personal address which kind of makes sense on account of there are a lot of pictures of my (young) nephews in my albums, but I also got it at my work address which is only associated with my personal address because I "shared" some photos with it (iow, shutterfly doesn't have any profile or my name associated with my work address).

It's still a stupid, insensitive thing to have done.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

That sucks. My sympathies.

[riofriotex.livejournal.com]

I got this e-mail too, and I am post-menopausal. Sounds like a marketing effort that went awry.

[chomiji]

*sends them evil nasties via long-distance telepathy*

*hugs*

[ro-anshi.livejournal.com]

Echoing riofriotex. Got it too, and the "equipment" has been inoperative since 2008.

But that still doesn't mean it doesn't SUCK. I'm so sorry.

[ro-anshi.livejournal.com]

(FWIW, there was an "egg on our faces" apology email from Shutterfly in my inbox this morning.)