Can’t Fight City Hall

We’ve all had the experience of having an error get into a computer record somewhere and having to go through years of bureaucratic nonsense in a (futile) effort to get it corrected; some of these problems will actually outlive the person whose records were corrupted and remain an annoyance to their family for years following their demise. The problem in these cases is that you’re not actually dealing with people; the entity involved is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are extremely dim creatures. Once they get an idea into their heads there’s just no shifting it – sheep have a better time coping with abstract concepts like “your data-entry people hit the wrong key” than most bureaucrats do. In the long run it is sometimes easier to just close your account and start over, abandon the property you’re trying to claim, or move away and leave no forwarding address then attempt to resolve the mistake. Unfortunately, in a case that hit the news sites this week, none of these things have persuaded a national retailer to stop attempting to sell things to a customer who passed away four years ago…

All of this would merely be a modestly annoying side story, except for two factors. First, as reported by the local television news, the customer in question was a two-year-old girl, and the company in questions (Toys “R” Us) will not stop sending birthday cards and pre-recorded phone messages to her mother, despite the fact that the mother has repeatedly called, written to and even visited the company trying to get them to stop this. Her most recent attempt involved a shouting match with the manager of her local Toys “R” Us store that almost resulted in her arrest – or that of the store manager; the responding officers couldn’t believe this crap any more than you can. Second, the company is actually spending extra advertising money on these activities that are ruining their reputation and making them look like idiots in front of the entire world on the Internet…

Most of these cases involve routine activities that are a regular part of whatever the applicable bureaucracy does in the first place, and those functions are made to be difficult to stop or discontinue for a reason. In the case of the Bank of America customer who continued to be charged account fees for months after she passed away, it’s really not in the Bank’s interest to make it easy for someone to be taken off the billing list; the handling of that case hit the news (and this blog) because of the persistent incompetence in dealing with the situation, not the fact that it had happened. But in this case, Toys “R” Us is actually paying extra money to harass this poor woman and undermine their own public reputation; it’s not just that they aren’t correcting a mistake, they’re actually making new ones…

Now, admittedly one set of “Birthday Club” cards and messages doesn’t cost that much; we’re talking probably 23 cents for the postage and another penny or two for the materials (and the phone lines), but you have to wonder how many more of these things are being wasted. If the company’s mailing lists are that sloppy, there’s a non-zero chance that some of these cards and messages are being sent to people who are no longer part of the demographic the company wants to reach – and that sort of thing adds up after a while. More to the point, perhaps, while a single successful Birthday Club mailer (e.g., one that results in a sale) will make up for many failed ones, if the public relations fallout from this fiasco results in a single person deciding not to purchase something at Toys “R” Us, it will have defeated the benefits of dozens or hundreds of these mailers. If the PR damage spreads widely enough, this one mailer could undermine the effects of the entire program…

I’m not saying the company should abandon the program, of course, but if I was one of the stockholders, I’d really want to see management review how those mailing lists are being maintained – and the procedures in place for correcting them…