Tell Sears “Please remove me from your call list, I don’t wish to receive calls from Sears anymore, Thank You”
As mentioned in the Pit thread, between five and ten calls a month when I had a land line, almost all between the hours of three and eight p.m. My parents got slightly more when I was in high school, maybe twenty a month, same hours. Y’all must buy from the wrong companies or pissed off the wrong people.
Digital answering machine. They can be silenced while they take calls. Besides, if you don’t receive any calls then why leave the phone on at all? Is the fear of some relative getting sick and you missing the call that intense for you?
Before the DNCR, 10-15 EVERY FREAKING DAY! Half of those were mortgage companies wanting me to use their company.
Five to six on the weekends. Starting 8:30am!
Since the DNCR - about 1-2 per month - usually “survey” companies. More during election times.
Now when I check the Caller ID log, any long distance number I can’t identify (and I Google them or call them if they’re toll free) gets reported to the DNCR.
I want to put as many of these companies out of business as possible.
You are being condescending and aren’t being subtle about it. I can promise and swear to you that my house never got less than three on a weekday evening, the average was around five, and the total for the day was about 10 if I stayed home all day. Other people here are saying the same thing and you are basically calling us liars all the way from another country.
You are missing one key point in your dismissal. Some households are TARGETED and appeal very strongly to telemarketers of all kinds. I have no idea what happened in the millions of other households in the U.S. All I know was that my young, mortgaged, college alumni, dual-income, car owning, catalog buying, young child, registered voter household got so many calls that I had to turn the ringer off if there was anything important going on.
Averages mean nothing if the distribution isn’t equal and it is not. Some people got harassed to hell and back and some of us are responding in this thread.
Now that the DNC list is in effect, I get a tiny fraction of that.
Is this some kind of survey?
Excuse me? I am being condescending? Hardly. I was just wondering where all this hatred came from. Hatred that is so intense it seems people can’t even answer a question about it without insulting someone. This is not the pit, just give your opinion and leave the rest out, ok?
As stated, in Canada, in arguably the wealthiest section of Canada. Being a single educated proffessional with an amount of disposable income I assumed that I would be one of the people the telemarketing companies would target. I get very few to none of these calls. I have, in the past, called Americans as a telemarketer. I have felt the hatred through the phone. I wanted a FACTUAL answer to the question (do I have to say that data/plural line to you?) about how many calls Americans recieve. This was so I could understand the hatred, and maybe agree with it.
I am hardly calling you a liar, nor did I dismiss anything. Eternal Hawk gave a very useful link showing maybe the problem isn’t as bad as some of you are making it out to be. jrfranchi provided other useful links.
You did nothing.
I have an strange story.
Many years ago, a young woman had an apartment with the phone in her name. I started dating her and later moved in with her. Still later we got married. We left the phone in her maiden name just to spot telemarketers. They asked for my wife using her maiden name. Later we got on the Do Not Call list and the calls basically stopped. However we never did get around to changing the name on the phone bill.
Years go by and we are now seperated. She moved out. So I had a phone in her maiden name. Suddenly, I started getting calls for my wife in her maiden name. Weird calls. The callers all claimed that my wife, using her maiden name, had filled out an on-line request for information on a product that they had. Stuff like, refinancing our home. (we only had an apartment) Or aluminum sideing, again for our apartment. Also many schools had the idea that my wife wanted to enroll in her maiden name of course.
Basically someone was scamming the telemarketers by filling out online forms with info from the phone book. The telemarketers then get a green light to call me but I’ll bet they paid someone for a page referal or something.
So I cut off the land line phone, got a cable modem and just use my cell phone.
For a while, I was getting about one call a month from a debt consolidation company on my cell phone. This would usually happen between 1-4pm on weekdays, so, instead of answering the call, I’d end up with a pre-recorded message in my voice mail.
Now, as desperate as I was to consolidate the $25 that I charge and pay off every month, I didn’t want people calling my cell phone, so I put the number on the national Do Not Call registry. I haven’t gotten a call since then.
Okay, factual answer. In this last week before the Do Not Call thing activated I got a low of three per night and a high of 11. Five of those were faxes, which not only wasted my time, they wasted my toner.
I got seven calls (three faxes) the week AFTER DNC was supposed to be activated and I reported them all, as they came in.
So it has now trickled down to about one per week. (This is not counting my business line, where I get sometimes 5 a day, usually fewer, occasionally more, none of which are anything I am going to buy so they are all a waste of my time. And the telemarketer’s too.)
I would like to add that when a live person from ARC calls me and asks if I have anything to leave out for their drivers the next week (or so), that doesn’t bother me. When the DAV recording asking essentially the same thing it annoys the heck out of me and I hang up on it.
When politicians call with a pre-election recorded message urging me to vote for them I put their name on the Wall of Shame and will not vote for them, but when live people in a campaign office call me and ask if they can count on my support–well, I may give my support or I may not, but I’m not rude to them.
However, if charities call me soliciting funds (not donations of outgrown clothing or other usable household items, as per ARC, but funds) because I’ve donated in the past, well, they are out of luck in the future. There are lots of charities. Some of them use mail.
Do you all really think affluent people/area codes get more calls? I would think they would get fewer. If affluence is a function of education the marketers would have a higher strike rate on less affluent people. That is assuming the higher the education level the less the propensity to buy questionable products from people they’ve never heard of.
I haven’t had a land line in 8 years, and always give a fake number to businesses that request it (Best Buy and the like), so I’ve never got a marketing call. I would be pretty mad at 5+ per day.
Yes, of course the reasonable solution to not wanting to get telemarketing calls is to arrange it so that you don’t get any calls at all. Because, obviously, if no one ever calls me unless it’s an emergency, why should I bother having a phone at all?
Are you serious? You seriously think that the solution is just to turn off the phone, and figure the odds that some emergency requiring my attention comes up are low enough that I shouldn’t worry about it? If someone I care about is in trouble, and needs my help, I doubt I’ll take much solace in knowing that while I may have missed their call, at least I didn’t get a sales pitch from the Danbury Mint.
I was a telemarketer. Not proud of it, hated the job, and I can certainly relate to the animosity directed at the poor shlubs doing the dirty work. But this argument pisses me off, and just does further damage to the reputation of people who have done the work.
DirecTV just got nailed with a 5.3 million dollar fine for violating the do not call list, so don’t expect too many calls from them in the future!
I did do something very useful. I pointed out the big problem is that you are asking for data that you can’t draw conclusions from. This can easily be a case of “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”. The average tells you very little. What you need to know to assess the problem is the distribution of the calls by household. It can easily be the case (and I believe it is) that many households got (get) very few calls while others were targeted by many, many telemarketers. You need data that shows either a curve or, better yet, the number of calls broken out by quintile (10% of households get over 5 calls a night). That would still be a very big problem no?
I have no idea what you only want the average for the average for but I can tell you as a person well versed in statistical presentation that what you are asking for is useless by itself. Numerous antedotes are not useless for this type of thing. At the least they should make yoyu realize that your pre-formed conclusions may require a different type of approach.
That is nothing but the facts.
I get about two a year, because I’m on the Do Not Call List. It’s one of the few things in this life that actually works as designed for me.
Sigh…I sure would, but I live with another person. He is determined that ANY MINUTE NOW an important call could come in . 
The price of co-habiting with someone!
What preformed conclusions? Unlike you, I don’t draw conclusions until I get all the facts. I would of course be very angry at getting 10 calls a night. However this just does not happen in Canada. Therefore I don’t understand why there is such anger towards these people. When I don’t understand something I try to find out facts so I can have a reasonable basis for any conclusions I may or may not draw. Facts are not anecdotes, no matter what statistical knowledge you may or may not have.
I have never said it was not a problem, I said maybe it wasn’t a problem, then went and read the link again, realized it came from the Telemarketers themselves, and is most likely skewed in their favour.
Why don’t you step back, take a deep breath, and stop allowing your hatred for this practice to cloud any judgement you may or many possess. This is not the pit, this thread was not and is not meant to allow anyone to defend or attack the practice of telemarketing. It is an attempt to get a factual basis to this problem so I can understand. You saying those numbers don’t exist doesn’t make it true.
What is your limit, would 3 calls between 6pm and 7pm as you are trying to eat with your family be to much?
Would a call on Sunday night at 8PM during the SuperBowl maybe anger you?
Not many people have mentioned 10 calls but many have listed 2-5 per night.
I found this completely unacceptable.
Would their still trying to pitch you after saying “No Thank you” get on your nerves.
Jim
I think Shagnasty’s point is that, in this sentence here, it sounds like you are trying to prove that people who say they get around 10 calls per night are lying (and there are at least three who state that in this thread alone). Or at least you are looking for a statistic that shows they may be lying. Now, while a detailed breakdown of who gets how many calls would be very interesting, it will never prove these people to be liars. There is no way we can ever find a statistic that says no one gets 10 calls per night, because tracking the number of calls to every single person in the US would be prohibitively expensive.
Either you trust the other forum members not to make stuff up, in which case their anger is justified, or you don’t.
Personally, I think you were just asking an innocent question that was misinterpreted.
I signed up for the Do Not Call list, but I get telemarketer calls at least twice a day, usually from the same companies. I use callwave, but I get a recording from an insurance company and a satellite company daily. I also get charity calls, debt consolidation loan deals, “you have won a free trip/tv/month of DSL” almost daily.
Yesterday I had the callwave turned off for ten minutes before AOL called me to let me know that they were working with Bellsouth and wanted to offer me free DSL for six months! All I had to do was sign up for Bellsouth Complete Choice Package for a gazillion dollars a month! Whoo hoo!
I said no thank you. She kept pushing. I said REALLY, NOT INTERESTED. She kept on. I finally just hung up, which is what I should have done in the first place. Silly me, I made the mistake of asking how much it was first.
Occasionally I’ll get a call from a carpet cleaner or “refinance your mortgage” people.
At least once a day I’ll get a call with nothing at all, just a very long beep after a very long pause. Not sure if it’s a sales call or a bill collector there. 
On days when I have been home sick, the phone rings on the average about every 45 minutes with a call that shows as Unidentified on the Caller ID. I’m assuming those are telemarketers.
At the Taekwondo school, it’s about the same.