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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Spurred by an irritated public, politicians have signed the death notice for telemarketing. But the end of sales calls will deliver another blow to the staggering economy.
Jul 15, 2003 | The overwhelming popularity of the national do-not-call list, which has logged more than 23 million telephone numbers since it went live on June 27, does not come as a surprise to people in the telemarketing industry. Telemarketers know how we feel about them. We make it clear all the time. They make 104 million calls every day, and while a surprising number of their pitches produce happy new unions between corporations and customers, tens of millions of calls end in words that should not be put down here. Even you, gentle reader, likely become an undignified boor when you receive a sales call -- you yell, swear, lie and, just as the harried marketer is getting to the best part of the deal, you hang up. And you don't feel bad about it; telemarketers, society has determined, do not deserve respect.
There is certainly no mystery to why we hate telemarketers. They bother us; we don't like that. But here's what irks the telemarketers -- they don't think the government should have stepped in to help us. They feel they've been singled out, unfairly barred from commerce, and abused by virtually every official in the country. "Even the president got himself right in the middle of this," says Jon Hamilton, a telemarketing consultant who helps firms set up their call centers. "Since when did the government become in charge of regulating annoyances?"
Telemarketing is an enormous business that hires millions of people and contributes to billions in commerce every year, but it is suddenly reeling under what insiders describe as a politically expedient bit of regulation. It surprises and offends telemarketers that, of all the scourges we suffer, lawmakers made this one a priority. Telemarketing is an annoyance, but that's all it is, people in the industry insist. Unsolicited sales calls won't give you cancer or heart disease or make you fat. Telemarketing doesn't damage the environment. It doesn't cause car accidents. Telemarketers don't hurt kids or animals. They aren't suspected of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Yet politicians of every stripe are united behind the issue, and they've come up with a solution -- the do-not-call list -- that experts say will devastate telemarketing.
So telemarketing will die. "Where's the bad news?" you're probably wondering.
In the United States in 2001, telemarketing companies employed 4 million people and generated $274 billion in sales, according to the WEFA Group, an economic research firm. The Federal Trade Commission, which set up the National Do Not Call Registry, estimates that by Oct. 1 -- the date on which telemarketers will be barred from calling the numbers on the list -- at least 60 million phone numbers will be off-limits to sales calls.
After that, says Tim Searcy, executive director of the American Teleservices Association, employment in his industry will plummet. Two million people will more or less instantly be put out of work, he says. That's just an estimate, and it's in Searcy's interest to play up the horrors that the new law will cause, but his theory is not completely unbelievable. If half the phones in the country will no longer accept marketing calls, it's not unreasonable to expect that half the people who work in the industry will no longer be needed -- and that, certainly, won't be good for the depressed economy.
The problems are compounded, Searcy says, when you consider the kinds of people telemarketing attracts. The industry hires an unusually large number of single mothers, people who are just getting off welfare programs, and people with physical disabilities; and most of its call centers are in rural areas, places where jobs are already scarce. When telemarketers lose their jobs, they'll have a hard time finding something else.
"There are towns where the largest single employer is a telemarketing firm," Hamilton says. "The local McDonald's only needs 10 or 15 burger flippers. It can't absorb thousands. Where are all those other people going to go? They're going to go on welfare."
Critics of telemarketing don't dispute that this new rule is going to cause economic hardships; they say the hardships are worth it. "It's a social welfare issue," says Robert Bulmash, who heads Private Citizen, a pioneering anti-telemarketing firm. The new rule might cause thousands of telemarketers to suffer, but millions of the rest of us will be better for it, he says. "Let's say that 10,000 handicapped people are working in the industry," he says. "What about the 10 million handicapped people who can't get to the phone when it rings, and who feel they have to get to it because this might be the one call that they've been waiting for?"
But the do-not-call list is open not only to the aged or the infirm; it's open to every healthy American who's physically capable of answering the phone but who feels, somehow, that he or she has a right not to be bothered if there's a salesperson on the other end. In a free country, what's so sacred about the phone that it should be exempt from commerce? And, if we do have a right not to be annoyed via the phone, how can politicians claim that they're allowed to infringe upon that right in order to give us political messages -- as they do in this regulation? People in the telemarketing industry see this as massive hypocrisy, and it makes them angry.
And while one is loath to defend them, these faceless, fast-talking people who call us during dinner, perhaps it's time someone did. Telemarketing isn't a crime. It's a profitable business responsible for legitimate employment. Yet it's just been regulated out of existence, and the country is applauding.
