For good or bad, how do organizations mislead customers and clients?

September 1, 2016 9:27 AM

We know the clichés: we are running a special sale this week, the chef recommends the squid, etc. But what are some other, less obvious professional lies, both malicious and well-intentioned?

Creative ways of scamming people are always entertaining, but I'm also curious to hear about white lies. For example, when I did phone surveys, one question was, "I apologize, but we're required to ask everyone: Are you male or female?", with the accompanying instruction: "Ask only if you are not sure whether respondent is male or female."

Examples from all contexts are welcome: to consumers, patients, clients, and students; in sales, retail, social services, medicine, education, and so on.

posted by Mr.Know-it-some to Work & Money (35 answers total)

Idk if this is obvious or not, but retail companies asking for your email address "to enter a prize draw" with the ulterior motive of gaining your contact details for marketing purposes.
posted by mymbleth at 9:46 AM on September 1, 2016

Facebook's "find your friends" feature, which uploads your entire address book. People don't realize how much you can tell from someone's address book, e.g. it probably contains everyone they've slept with or are sleeping with now, who they buy drugs from, which specialist doctors they have visited, etc.
posted by w0mbat at 9:57 AM on September 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Best answer: I do support for a (free) web project that is practically unsupported at a development level. When someone writes to complain about something that is legitimately broken, I tell them truthfully that I have opened a trouble ticket about that issue. I do not tell them, also truthfully, that there is a 80-90% chance nothing will ever come of that. I also tell them that their feature requests are often things we'd like to see in a 2.0 version of our website. This is true (we'd love to see those things) but also misleading (there are very few plans for a 2.0 version of our website). A lot of triage-level customer support is like this.

If users continue to complain and/or report things, I just send them to the level of people who can actually effect change on this broken thing, knowing that they will not reply or acknowledge this contact. If I establish a rapport with the user (I really like our users, the larger org does not, particularly) I do also explain that we've got, at best, a fractional developer and that our feedback system is somewhat broken. I'm actually more responsible for keeping the users away from the process than rolling their feedback into it. I suspect this is not unusual.
posted by jessamyn at 10:01 AM on September 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

'We'll call you back'
posted by Kwadeng at 10:09 AM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

"While supplies last" "limited supply" has a lot of potential uses and definitions, from disclaimer to enticement.

Things without punctuation "Fresh Grilled Daily" "Freshly Prepared" is the grilling fresh? is the preparation fresh? because you're being pretty careful not to say "fresh food"

Also maybe not a white lie, but you'd be amazed how fungible the country of manufacture is.
posted by French Fry at 10:22 AM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

In the military, supposedly "no one dies on Christmas." They supposedly change the date of death by one day if that happens.
posted by Michele in California at 10:22 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't have voice mail. I get pretty regular assertions from secretaries etc: "We left you multiple voice mails." Clearly lying about calling people is a routine thing.

Also: "Suggested retail price." Especially in outlet malls and Winners/TJ Maxx-type stores.
posted by kmennie at 10:24 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

The military death thing looks to be urban legend. Example: Tribute: Army surgeon killed in Mosul Christmas day
posted by kmennie at 10:26 AM on September 1, 2016

When I was a hostess we were instructed to never give wait times over 20 minutes. Some people got frustrated and left, yeah, but they probably would have left if we had said 40 minutes until a table is free. It's amazing how long some people will wait.
posted by kinsey at 10:27 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

"I have to check with the [X] Department."

I am the X Department. I already know the answer is no. But people are more likely to accept a no when you add a layer of vague outside authority.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:30 AM on September 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Art materials industry: Volume manufacturing in cheap labor countries, minimally assembled in Western Europe so sticker can be applied: "Made in Romantic Fantasy Country of Origin". Charging Americans super inflated rates compared to Rest of World (also known as ROW, nyuk nyuk) because that's what the American market can bear and Americans buy "Made in Romantic Fantasy Country of Origin" art materials. Twenty five dollars worth of art materials placed in a cheap wooden box and marketed as "Romantic Art Fantasy Complete Kit", also known as (nyuk, nyuk) "Doctor's Wife Box". Ok, I'll stop and go back to painting now. Oh, one more: many brands made by the same company, different label, different language, different brand identity: now made in China, actually.
posted by effluvia at 10:32 AM on September 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

The latest thing in spam, especially with companies that may be at least nominally legit, or at least claim to be selling something I would actually use is the "I'm following up" email.

day 1 - get a spam email or voicemail from someone you've never heard of and don't really want to do business with. Delete it/ignore it.

day 3-5 - get another spam email or voicemail "I'm following up on the information I sent you - I want to continue the discussion about how XYZ Offshore Outsource Barn is right for you..."

I guess there are people who get so much email they honestly can't remember that this is NOT a discussion they've been having...
posted by randomkeystrike at 10:36 AM on September 1, 2016

"Your call is important to us."
posted by kevinbelt at 10:55 AM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

My friend told me that when her cable box stopped working, the tech on the phone asked her to swap the ends of the HDMI cable, and once she did that it started working again. I strongly suspect that this is something that they suggest because some people will lie and say that they checked for loose connections when they did not.
posted by amarynth at 10:59 AM on September 1, 2016 [15 favorites]

Click here as soon as possible to read this Hubspot article about creating a sense of urgency, before the end of the day if you can!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:28 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Have you tried clearing your browser cache?" while committing a fix for the issue as we speak.
posted by eustacescrubb at 11:41 AM on September 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

amarynth: "My friend told me that when her cable box stopped working, the tech on the phone asked her to swap the ends of the HDMI cable, and once she did that it started working again. I strongly suspect that this is something that they suggest because some people will lie and say that they checked for loose connections when they did not."

Having a user unplug and then plug in a network cable does nothing if the cable is plugged in; it however cures network problems if the cable isn't plugged in in the first place.
posted by Mitheral at 12:12 PM on September 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I work a public library. People dispute their fines every day. It is usually easy to tell who *really* needs a break, and who feels entitled to just not pay the fine. But I don't want to set up the expectation that fines are totally optional (because I worked somewhere that tried that and it was poorly implemented and was a nightmare). So when I waive part of all of the fines I make a big deal of whispering to the patron that "I'm not supposed to do this, so don't tell anyone, but just this once, I can waive your fines by XX amount". My team, of course, have that same authority and do the same routine. However, there are times my team do not want to waive the fines (or want the person brought to my attention because they are giving them the benefit of the doubt but something seems hinky") and the way the person is introduced to me (as the manager and final decider) lets me know what my team member REALLY wants me to say.
posted by saucysault at 12:47 PM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

When an angry tech support customer asked to speak to a manager my call center friends usually just transferred to each other. Our manager was seldom at his desk and explicitly did not want to hear from customers.
posted by the marble index at 12:55 PM on September 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I was going to say something like marble index—I was once a Assistant Coordinator in a job, and there was a day when the two Coordinators above me were both going to be in an all-day meeting with The Head Honcho, and they both explicitly said, "You're in charge, you handle everything, you're the decider." I think I faked two phone calls to them that day.

From the customer perspective, "Let me talk to someone else/your manager" is a productive thing, because often there are options the front-line person doesn't have the power to offer. But sometimes from the customer-service perspective, if you know a person is asking for something they absolutely can't have, or they're just frustrated with you as the obstacle in their path, a pro forma fake or semi-fake check in with a "manager" is what they need to be able to believe in the No you're telling them.
posted by not that girl at 1:06 PM on September 1, 2016

Doctors (and other medical professionals) often prescribe treatment which won't have a direct effect, but will help anyway due to the placebo effect.

Often this is great, and powerful, but not when it's antibiotics!

In one study, the most effective pill was shown to be a red octagonal one.
posted by fizban at 1:46 PM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

When I've led committee meetings that ended in a stalemate over whether X or Y is the best course of action, I have discovered that if I pick either my favorite option or the option that requires the least effort to implement and say something like "Well, let's try X for [period of time], and if that's not working, we'll revisit the decision at that point," 99% of the time we never bother to revisit the decision.

This course of action has stopped me from committing violence more than once. (I suspect the reason we have a stalemate in the first place is that both courses of action are equal so we're mostly arguing semantics.)
posted by telophase at 2:07 PM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I used to work in an office that got a ton of unsolicited sales calls. Whoever received one would politely tell the salesperson to hold on, "let me forward your call to our supplies purchaser" --- then we'd actually forward those calls to a never-answered phone's voicemail.

I had a hard time not laughing the day one sales guy tried an end run around the switchboard: he asked for our small company's president by name, then said he was the president's brother --- two obvious problems with that: our president doesn't HAVE any brothers, plus the sales guy drastically mis-pronounced his and his 'brother's' name....
posted by easily confused at 2:14 PM on September 1, 2016

The "lie by omission": if I have a half-dozen or more deliverables for someone and I haven't done anything to advance one of them, it accidentally gets left off the status update and most of the time clients don't think to ask about the thing they don't see listed in front of them.
posted by psoas at 3:36 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Back by popular demand" can mean "we have way too much inventory and are trying to get rid of it".
posted by radioamy at 4:52 PM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Doctors do not prescribe placebos, at least not without explicitly telling the patient "this is a placebo, it's just sugar, but it might make you feel better anyway." (Which is done rarely, but not never.)

Prescribing a placebo and passing it off as an active medication is unethical because it violates informed consent. I'm not saying it is never done, but it's a well-established ethical violation and could land the prescribing doctor in hot water if they were caught.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:58 PM on September 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

A bit more than just a white lie, Coles supermarkets used the slogan that their bread was "Baked Fresh Daily", omitting that that was 6 months ago on the other side of the planet
posted by goshling at 11:33 PM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

British supermarkets have been caught putting labels like "bigger pack, better value!" or similar on larger packets of goods which were actually per-kg or per-item more expensive than the smaller/individual packs. For example tins of sweetcorn were 40p each and a pack of three tins labelled "Value pack" was £1.50.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:32 AM on September 2, 2016

No product does X better than Our Product = we all do X about the same.
posted by theora55 at 7:10 AM on September 2, 2016

I worked for a photography lab that marketed their ability to print full color photographs on a variety of media such as wood, metal, glass etc. As a "bonus" it included a free protective plastic coating. In reality the picture was printed onto the plastic which was glued onto the media.
posted by Sophont at 2:41 PM on September 2, 2016

Best answer: I sell lumber in a retail setting to contractors and the general public. If people have accounts set up with us then they're tied to a certain salesman, who officially is their point of contact in the company but literally anyone else in sales can take care of them. Just because I feel like it, we'll call their salesman here Bob because it's easy to type.

1 - Customers call all the time demanding to talk to Bob and just want to see where their delivery or special orders are. We all have access to the systems that tell us that information, but I tell them that Bob is busy or not there. Unless Bob is personally driving their stuff to the job site he doesn't know more than I do anyway. And sometimes I just tell them that Bob isn't there because I know he doesn't want to talk to them right now for some reason.

2 - We have pricing tiers. Basically "You buy a whole lot from us," "you consistently buy from us," and "you don't buy a lot from us." There used to be a lower priced tier for "you but a shit ton from us" and a higher priced one for "you are a random person walking in off the street." People we recognized would automatically get the contractor rate, no matter what. But since we switched to just 3 levels some of the contractors are on the most expensive plan. So when a random person asks me if they're getting the contractor rate and implying that they want to pay less than a random walk in I reply "yes" and imply that they get the same rate as some contractors. Yeah, I know that's being picky.

3 - Bob trusts me enough to let me give his customers deals on things when I need to. I've seen him do it a lot and we think the same way. But if you're being a pain in the ass I tell you that I won't do it because I'm not going to mess with Bob's sales numbers.
posted by theichibun at 3:12 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't want to start an argument, and want to be clear that I am not disparaging doctors when I say they are using placebo as a treatment.
Nevertheless, here is a good example from the BMJ of a survey showing that around half of the respondees do prescribe both true placebo (saline or sugar pills) or drugs which have no recognised clinical effect on the given condition. Ethically it's complicated, of course, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
posted by fizban at 4:23 AM on September 3, 2016

I've become increasingly annoyed with fake product photos which I think falls into this category. You know the type--we have the same item in twenty different colors and it costs a lot to take 20 different high-quality photos, so we'll take one and then have Joe who's good with photoshop color shift it to represent all the other colors. (You can tell, because the tiny details like the folds in the item or the style of the models hair are all exactly the same, down to the last pixel.) The problem is, you took a photo of a dark or mid-color version which is pretty opaque, and a bunch of people ordered the white version which is sheer to the point of entirely see-through.
posted by anaelith at 7:26 AM on September 3, 2016 [3 favorites]

Also, "reboot your computer" as the first suggestion. It does legitimately work a lot of the time, but it also covers user error such as "computer was not on".
posted by anaelith at 7:28 AM on September 3, 2016

Placebo buttons
Vanity sizing
posted by lakeroon at 10:10 AM on September 3, 2016