“Our Customers are Idiots!”

Like many people, I find that I really enjoy some TV commercials, and I really dislike some others. I have noted, however, that some people seem to be really annoyed by commercials that I find inoffensive or even entertaining, while I some commercials that really aggravate me don’t seem to bother other people. A few weeks ago, I did a brief Google search for the phrase that I used as the title of this posting, and found a lot of discussions that suggested to me that I am not the only person who is generally annoyed by commercials that suggest that the company advertising its products or services thinks of its customers as fools. One set of such commercials that was often mentioned in this regard was the series plugging the Sonic drive-in chain. Strictly from my own personal point of view, no individual one of these commercials is so outrageously annoying that it would prevent me from ever patronizing Sonic (although I don’t much care for Sonic anyway), but the sheer number of different, mildly to moderately annoying commercials in this seemingly endless series definitely gets on my nerves.

However, rather to my surprise, in the (admittedly not exhaustive) searches I performed I did not find a single reference to the small set of commercials that, to me at least, represented far and away the most irritating example of the “our customers are idiots” genre: the (thankfully) brief series of Staples’ “Wow! That’s a LOW Price!” commercials that appeared a few years ago. This series of commercials was so aggressively annoying(not to say insulting) to me that I found myself regretting that Topeka, where I live, did not have a Staples store, because I had a strong desire to walk into a Staples, find the Customer Service counter, and convey the message (in a restrained way; I didn’t want to be as obnoxious as these commercials were) that I would not spend a penny in a Staples for as long as this ad campaign was running.

Given the fairly short duration of this ad campaign, I don’t think I was the only person who was annoyed, and perhaps someone in a city that did have a Staples store did actually take the step that I had only fantasized about, and convey this annoyance to the company in person. I would like to think that Staples even found a different ad agency – one that didn’t think that insulting the company’s customers was the way to attract more business – and even, perhaps, that the person responsible for this campaign may have realized that he or she was in the wrong line of work, and went on to seek employment better suited to his or her talents. (I won’t suggest an appropriate line of work, because to do so would be an insult to anyone who is currently earning a living doing whatever I might suggest.)

Anyway, this is more than enough about this particular annoying series of commercials, but I hope to write at least one more post addressing some of the other more annoying TV commercials I have encountered in recent years. That may take a while, however, so in the mean time, I hope that readers of this post might respond by citing commercials that they find particularly annoying (or even by defending those two Sonic dolts, if they wish to do so). And if anyone reading this piece did find those Staples commercials as irritating as I did, and actually did convey this sentiment to the employees in a Staples store, please identify yourself and accept my sincere gratitude, since you may have helped get those commercials off TV, and therefore helped lower my blood pressure.