DONNIE BURGESS:

Your property at PO Box 166 may be eligible for special programs from Government Sponsored Institutions. Your census tract is currently being targeted by our Equal Lending Assessment Center for loans from major depository institutions without the usual restrictions on credit history, income or employer status.

If you are the legal owner of the above property, you may benefit from programs created by Federal Agencies. If you are not the legal owner, please forward this notice to them or return to sender.

But seriously, this is obviously a computer generated form, complete with unique offer number, mine happens to be LQY6-0665-524, which I am sure is the same as everyone else’s. The question that I have is don’t they have the ability to screen out po box addresses when they generate this kind of crap?

Also I wonder how important it really is that I forward this to the legal owner of the property PO Box 166, you know the post office. I hope they are aware of this tremendous financial opportunity already, ’cause I think I am just gonna go ahead and toss mine in the trash.

There is a little thing at the very bottom of the page, written in a font size that is significantly smaller than the rest of the letter, it says “This product or service has not been approved or endorsed by any government agency and this offer is not being made by any agency of the government.”

Has it really come full circle so fast? Is it once again more profitable to send out junk mail through the post office since no one reads junk email? If so I sure do hope the trend continues. I know exactly who I am supposed to get real mail from and that is about all I ever open, with the occasional credit card offer (sort of like playing the lotto there, just trying to see if I can beat the best offer for balance transfers. If you take the time to do it, and have relatively good credit, you can transfer balances every year or so and never pay a penny of interest on your credit card debt. While making your credit better. The world is odd indeed). With email I do open some that appear to be from real people, though never if there is an attachment, just because my various web pages over the years have led a lot of strangers to email me. I have pretty serious doubts that anyone would send me an actual letter though, and the computer generated addresses on envelopes are really easy to pick out when there are four occurrences of the letter ‘e’ on it, there is no way to make them all identical if you are writing it by hand and, unless you happen to be a lot more patient than me, you may write the letter on the PC, but the envelope gets made out by hand simply because it is faster than changing your printer setting for envelopes, finding where to put the envelope, printing it out upside down first, before finally getting it right. Only to realize that you missed one digit in the zip code, thus starting the process over. Four envelopes, and twenty minutes later, you have accomplished what could have been done in 5 seconds with a pen. The marvels of technology.

That was a really horrible parallel to use for the point I am going to try to make, but it was the first thing that came to mind. I am just saying that people follow. Would we have millions of people driving ugly, dangerous, gas-guzzling SUV’s were it not for the for the pack mentality?

The tangent that I am going to spin off on today is in regards to car commercials. Not the insane, often impossible, images that you see on the television, but the ads (promotions) themselves. The new best offer of all time is employee pricing. I have been thinking about this for a couple of months, while listening to the advertising, knowing that it is complete bullshit, but, it keeps going and going. Now every dealership is offering the “employee pricing” to anyone that walks onto the lot.

I have never been in the auto business so all I have to offer is common sense, but sense of any sort is more logical than the latest dealer fad(fraud).

The fad several years ago was to offer you 5,000 dollars for any trade, which seems like a good deal, what they didn’t tell you was that the offer was only on cars that the dealer designated. You ended up paying far more than the MSRP on any other car, even after they took the 5,000 dollars off for your trade in. Good deal? No. Good marketing? Well, it worked. Should it be legal to market so falsely? I don’t think so, yet, they were able to get away with it by marketing a car at one price, then follow that statement with the phrase “exclusive of that offer”.

The current fad/fraud in the auto business is the ‘employee pricing’. It started off with Chevy (I think, at least that was the first ad that I heard it on) and it has snowballed since then. Major props to Isuzu, who is still making fun of the employee pricing. Everyone else in the auto business is trying to offer the same ‘employee pricing’ deal to every mark on the lot. And people are still falling for it.

I don’t know how much simpler it could be to know that this is outright fraud; look at the MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) to the layman, of the auto that you see advertised on the television, go to the dealership to see the same vehicle, then notice how the MSRP seemed to go up by several thousand dollars while you were on your way. I guess the seatbelts must cost a lot of money? No fear though, they can get the auto down to only slightly higher than the MSRP once you have your ‘employee discount’. Wow, pay more than normal now that I am an employee? I am on it! Wouldn’t common sense tell you that employees would pay the same, or possibly less, than the general public?

That must be a really humorous exchange down at the GM factory:

GM Exec: “You’re late.”

Employee: “My bicycle had a flat tire.”

GM EXEC: “You’re in luck, you can use our Employee Pricing to buy a new car.”

Employee: “But, I can’t afford to buy a new car.”

GM EXEC: “You should have thought about that before you slept in.”

Employee: “I have a wife and children.”

GM EXEC: “Don’t worry, they will get employee pricing too.”

Employee: “My children are too young to work, and my wife has to watch them during the day.”

GM EXEC: “Why not buy her a car? She could run errands while watching the children.”

Employee: “I can’t afford a car on the wages you pay me! You want more than 10,000 American dollars for a new car, you pay me 1.5 American dollars per day!”

GM EXEC: “I understand your position…You don’t want to spread the good name of the General Motors Company to others”.

Employee: “Kill me, just kill me now. Perhaps my wife and son could then live off of my death benefits.”

GM EXEC: “Sorry, you do not work within the contiguous 48 states, no benefits for you!”

Employee: “will you go ahead and kill me anyway… My son is starving, my wife is pregnant, if I come home without a paycheck I would be better off dead.”

GM EXEC: “You’ve forced my hand, I will offer you employee pricing on your next GM automobile purchase.”

Employee: “You don’t pay me enough to buy an automobile! My son has died of malnutrition, my wife had a miscarriage and died. Thank you, Sir, for destroying my life!”

GM EXEC: “I see that you are upset…”

Employee: (whips out a gun) “Taste hot lead, asshole! Employee pricing my ass! Die you son of a bitch, die!”

GM EXEC’S Supervisor: “I wonder where that assault rifle came from… Calling number 3482, I need a new ambassador…..”