Goddam it. There’s a special place in hell for the marketing shitheads who spend their life trying to figure out a new place to jam a screen to scream ads at us.
My local Chevron station just installed them on top of their pumps so that you can’t avoid having commercials yammered at you when you’re filling up. It must piss other people off, too, because I’ve seen loogies hawked onto them and gum smeared across them. I just started taking my business elsewhere, even though this particular Chevron is the most convenient for me.
I’d like to complaint to Chevron, but I know that complaints given to the clerk will go absolutely nowhere. It really pisses me off.
Complain to their corporate office. It will still go nowhere, but instead of a perplexed minimum-wage clerk you’ll get a nice boilerplate letter thanking you for your valued comments.
In similar situations I’ve tried to at least get some amusement value out of it. I complained to Netflix once about the insanely long waits for new release movies, and of course got a contentless form email in response. For fun, I responded and continued responding to each successive email from the customer service drone, making each of my replies slightly more bizarre than the last, just to see how long I could drag it out before they stopped answering. I think it was the fourth or fifth reply when the drone apparently caught on that I was being facetious and announced that the issue was “closed.”
Juvenile, sure… but you’re never too old for childish, petty revenge!
I haven’t seen those anywhere yet, but wow, that would drive me away from those locations too.
I would definitely find someone to complain to, though. You’re probably right that complaints to the clerk would go nowhere, but Chevron’s website has general contact info. I’m sure they’d be interested to find out that you won’t be buying gas form their stations because of this. Maybe.
As far as I’m concerned they’d be keeping me from enjoying a few moments of my own thoughts without being sold to, yelled at, hypnotised, lectured, conned, or otherwise.
The Shell station here has these, I don’t go to BP but I think they do here too.
The Shell TV’s here are sponsored by NBC. Generally it’s a promo for a show, a few seconds of entertainment gossip, then the local NBC weatherchick does a quick forecast.
Usually I watch, but if it annoys you so much, use the time to wash your windshield, or throw the trash out that’s sitting on the floor of your car or something?
They’re keeping me from buying gas without having to watch/listen to ads. I don’t want a TV in front of my face every second of the day, and it irritates me that more and more businesses are taking advantage of any idle second with a screen full of ads. Movie theaters, grocery stores, gas stations – it’s fucking annoying.
What bugs me about the ones at the Shell I go to is the volume. They pipe the audio for the TV shit through the speakers throughout the fill-up area, and the volume IS REALLY FRICKING LOUD. Good thing I don’t need to think in order to gas up my car, because it’s almost that loud.
Leela: Didn’t you have ads in the twentieth century? Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio… and in magazines… and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree.
I know that I get annoyed every time a business finds a way to increase revenue by devaluing my experience as a customer that doesn’t result in a more affordable product.
A small drop in the bucket, perhaps, but it adds to the creeping feeling that there are increasingly fewer places to rest one’s eyes where they won’t set on an advertisement of some kind.
Slightly more insidious for being in that class of advertising that includes monitors posted above urinals, “exciting offers” foisted on us while we’re waiting patiently on hold for customer service, et cetera, that are more difficult to avoid seeing/listening to. Sure, you can always try to ignore them, but in aggregate they amount to a form of mind pollution that assaults from every direction, concerning (in probably 99.99% of cases) shit we don’t want, need, or care in the slightest about, and yet have thrown in our faces every waking hour of every day of our lives.
Not that there’s any particular sanctity to the pumpside “moment of silence,” but for the love of God, can’t we retain the few that remain, and be left in fucking peace once in a while?