It feels like a fundamental forgetting that at the other end of your business transaction is a human being. I've been telling this story to friends lately. I ha

It feels like a fundamental forgetting that at the other end of your business transaction is a human being. I've been telling this story to friends lately. I have a "membership" to a local car wash. As long as I go 2x / month it's worth it, but if I don't I'm wasting money. Usually that means I'm wasting money in the winter months, but overall I tend to make it up in the summers and have been relatively happy with things. In the past year, the car wash was sold to some other owners, possibly a small chain. Price remained the same and service remained roughly the same, so I'd kept the membership. A few months back they randomly sent a text out to all the membership customers announcing the finalization of the ownership change. Up until this point, they'd never texted me before, but ok a change like that might be worth sending an unexpected "marketing text" to everyone. Suddenly every couple of weeks I'm getting new marketing text blasts to come by and make sure my car is clean for the upcoming weekend or some other stupid thing like that. Not to upgrade my membership, and not for any "hey we're running a promotion of 50% off the ceramic coating" or anything similar. Just annoying "it's a weekend, come get your car washed" texts, to a member where you don't even get any upsells when you come in to use your membership in the first place. They make more money if I don't show up and use my membership and they're spamming me without any offers that might even make it worth while. And now I'm annoyed. They could have just not started sending out marketing campaigns to their members. Like I said, they don't have upsell options when you go through on your membership tag (they used to but that stopped with the ownership change). They could have sent a text saying something like "hey, we haven't seen you in a while and we wanted to remind you you're still paying for an active membership, come on by". That would feel personal, like they care (even if they don't) that me not using my membership is a waste of my money. They could even have made it a marketing blast with "as a thanks for sticking with us, we're going to give you a free/discounted ceramic coating" or some other extra on your next wash". But they didn't do that either. So now, instead of me having a story to tell people about this awesome car wash place that really takes care of their customers, I instead have a story of a stupid car wash place that started annoying me for no reason at all. They've also incentivized me to re-examine the membership and other options in the area because of their decision to just start being stupidly annoying. All because probably someone somewhere in the decision chain saw some numbers that said if they blast thousands of texts out, that could turn into some extra hundreds in sales, and didn't even stop to think that some real human lives at the other end of that text and wasn't expecting or wanting that text.