Upselling Considered Harmful

I hate being upsold. Rel­ev­ant upselling (I’m buy­ing a wash­ing machine, the per­son says “this soap powder is spe­cially designed to work with this style of wash­ing machine”) is one thing. Irrel­ev­ant upselling, or upselling that takes more than one sen­tence just annoys me. 

The latest example was, I call my bank about some­thing this morn­ing. We fin­ish that trans­ac­tion, I’m ready to get back to work, when the woman starts talk­ing to me about who my long-dis­tance phone pro­vider is and telling me about their offer­ings! This was­n’t rel­ev­ant to the pre­vi­ous trans­ac­tion, she did­n’t ask if it was a good time, and she did­n’t even both­er with the hitherto-oblig­at­ory “is there any­thing else I can do for you today” which used to be the stand­ard clos­ing formula. 

Hairdress­ers (and the beauty busi­ness in gen­er­al) are par­tic­u­larly prone to this; I just don’t go back to estab­lish­ments that upsell too hard.