Anytime someone wished me Happy New Year during the festive season, I paraphrased a line from a Damon Runyon story: “What's happy about it?”
I don't see a thing to cheer about as we enter 2003. Take our allegedly robust economy.
You may think that you have a reason to go on living just because your sales have finally returned to their 1988 level. You fool.
At last glance, 6% of the work force was unemployed, and another 10% was waiting for the ax. The rest are waiting for Osama to strike again.
Does anyone wonder why response rates are tanking?
Then there are the regulatory problems that could destroy direct marketing.
At press time, the Federal Trade Commission was trotting out its do-not-call plan, and Sen. Richard Shelby was making ever-more-threatening noises about FCRA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Soon you'll need permission to send a bill to a customer.
Not that this is totally unjustified. Direct marketers have a knack for doing exactly what annoys the public most, then repeating it.
Let's turn to the post office, and to that good news that pundits have been prattling about: That Bush is creating a presidential commission to study the mess.
Are they serious? Even if they hand the report in on time, it will take months to convert that into a program. And when they do, it'll have to be translated into English and sold to Congress, the postal unions and the public.
And what can they possibly do, privatize the USPS? Check out some of the other great efforts at privatization — of prisons, schools, and the London Tube. The last I heard, the Tube was barely running and the inmates in a privately run youth facility were being abused on a nightly basis by the guards.
Anyway, who cares about the post office when the entire snail-mail process is so screwed up? As Patty Odell reports on page 9, alleged scam artists are slipping their mailing pieces past the list industry's airtight security system.
Do you want to make a fortune in mail order overnight? (Well, who doesn't?) Just dummy up a piece with a name nobody has heard of and submit it to a list manager — that is, if you can find a list that has some new names on it.
And if you're past that stage and are now making a living milking your customer list until it's dry, here's more bad news. As Richard Levey writes in our cover story, it will soon be impossible to hire a data analyst.
Last but not least, there's the world situation. As the Marx Brothers sang, “We're going to war, this is a fact we can't ignore.” My only consolation is that I'm too long in the tooth to be drafted.
So get it straight: The glass is half empty, and there's little reason to get up in the morning.
