This bitch is pretty specific. Car insurance companies seem to be getting away with the worst false advertising ever, unless you count the “Employee Pricing for Everyone” programs that every car dealer is now using.
I will even get a bit more specific: The company is Allstate. They are running commercial ads that say that you can save ( I forget the exact number ) $300 dollars a year by switching to them. I was intrigued. How can that be true? It took watching the commercial a couple of dozen times before I figured out exactly how they were making that claim; they are flat-out lying.
At the very bottom of the screen, and only when they make the claim of the “average savings”, there comes up a little line (and I mean tiny) that says, “Savings claim based on customers who reported saving when switching to Allstate.” Okay, that sucks. Where are the real numbers? They can actually claim that the “average savings” was whatever when that only counts the people who saved money? Shouldn’t they have to follow that up with another line about how for others they were paying an average of $700 more? At least then you could add up the numbers and do the math yourself.
I am really thinking that their claim might not have been legal. I am thinking that only because the most recent commercial that I saw doesn’t say anything about the “average savings”, instead it says that “for many, they actually saved money by switching to Allstate.” That isn’t much better though, who defines many? One is a person, two is a pair, three is a few, so any group of four or more could be many, right? (that would explain how they could save so much money by switching to the highest priced auto insurance in the country though, just take four people who have recently sent their children away to school, knock off the money for that and the fact that they are middle-aged, Boom, big savings.) The claim is clearly false, but big business has never let that stop them from telling mistruths before and it’s not likely they are going to start now.
Sometimes I really wish that I could be a religious man (I would pray for it but it doesn’t seem to work) just so I could see the lawyers, used car dealers, the majority of the priests, insurance salesmen and about 99.8% of the corporate hierarchy in the U.S. sizzling away in Hell. Of course wishing them harm would be a sin wouldn’t it? That is why I am not religious; I want to see them all burn in hell for their deeds, but I don’t want to burn in hell for wanting them to burn in hell. Damn it! I just figured out how religion works. It is sort of like high school. You don’t have to be the best, or the brightest, or the most attractive, no, you just have to find someone that is worse than you and strive to be better than him/her. Then you really have to believe that since Jimmy just killed a cat down the street, you are one step closer to God. If Father J molests 32 children and God will still have him, and you only molest 31, you are so in!
I think I might have gone a bit off topic there. The point that I was trying to get to, yet never did, is about the legality of the claims car insurance companies make. Whether or not they put enough disclaimers (and if they are “disclaimers”, meaning that they are opposite to what they are claiming to be the facts, why do they print it so small?) in the ad to make it legal, it is still not ethical. No one would ever buy a car from someone that they knew was a rip-off artist, but that is what you get when you buy car insurance from any company.
Is it really not possible to make legal and ethical both mean about the same thing? I don’t mean that in a What would Jesus do kind of way, I am merely speculating that most people don’t like to be ripped off. I guess the whole ethical idea is flawed anyway, since they did mention something pretty similar to that in the bible, it was something about treating others as you would be treated. Hell, honestly now, “treat others as you wish to be treated” could have made up the majority of the U.S. constitution. Many of the amendments are necessary as well since I believe that if you are a human you have the same rights as me, regardless of gender, color, religious affiliation and the such.
Perhaps the constitution could read, simply, “Don’t cheat me and you won’t get shot.” Probably wouldn’t take the High Court long to figure out what that meant.
This post has been on a ‘stream of consciousness (arguably)’ mode for a while now. I remember that I hate car insurance companies so I will end with that. I hate car insurance companies!