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Don’t cling

Once I was logged in, I checked “Unsubscribe from ALL,” then clicked “Update your Subscriptions.” At that point I was shown the following message:

These delays and “you may get one more e-mail” notices are standard practice, but I don’t see why customers should accept them. Why can’t the program that sends the emails validate the addresses immediately before it sends a new batch? There’s no good reason for that, except for a business’s tendancy to cling inappropriately. It’s like the person you’ve dumped who thinks one more date/week/whatever will change the fundamental problems of a toxic relationship. If I’d been dating TicketMaster, by now I’d be filing a restraining order.

TicketMaster has lost me as a customer, for good. Their fee structure didn’t do it; years of complaints about their allegedly monopolistic business practices didn’t do it. This experience has done it. There is no benefit to TicketMaster in attempting to retain or recapture me as a customer. Whatever resources they expend to do so are wasted. There is one data point that might be of business use to them: “What’s the straw that broke the camel’s back?” (Which I’m explaining, in detail, right now.)

In order to even get to the unsubscribe screen, I had to click through a good half-dozen cookies in order to login. Among other things, TicketMaster wanted to store my IP address for ten years. Which is ludicrous. The odds I’ll even have the same IP address in ten years are very slim. The tracking data from this visit is worse than useless, because it amalgamates my (non-customer) behavior with customer data. A business doesn’t need to track hits on the “unsubscribe” page with Akamai or Fireclick; it can be tracked through changes in the subscription database.

And all of the foregoing is bad, or at least dumb. But worse than that, it didn’t even work!.

Weeks later, I’m still getting unwanted emails from TicketMaster. If I log in, I now see a screen that says I’m not subscribed to any emails:

If I choose “Unsubscribe from ALL,” again, I get the same “you-have-to-wait-24-hours” message.

Feh. I’m fed up.

continued. . .

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