New Trend - Unreasonable Delivery Terms From Info-Products Sellers!

Are you talking about asking for such information after your payment has been processed, or as part of the checkout process?

If it is during the checkout process, it may be a requirement of the vendor's payment processor, especially if they use their own merchant account. It's a fraud prevention thing, making sure the info entered into the shopping cart matches that on record with the credit card issuer.

If the request comes only after payment goes through, I'm with Kay. I'm seeing more privacy policies, especially ones using the usual "we hate spam" language, with a term buried somewhere about sharing info with selected partners. The "selected partners" are anyone who buys the list.

(Slightly off topic... I wonder how many of those 'we hate spam' things are incomplete thoughts. 'We hate spam, but we'll do it or enable it if it makes us a buck, suckers.")

Long before Al Gore invented the Internet, I did a stint as an assistant manager at a Radio Shack store. Company policy required asking each customer for their address, no exceptions. Too many tickets without addresses was cause for discipline.

So we asked. If the customer refused, we didn't make a big thing of it. We just added a tic mark on the ticket and later added "refused" in the address form. Never got in trouble.

So when they tell you it's store policy, they're probably telling you the truth. Odds are, they're as sick of asking as you are of answering. Cut them some slack and make the transaction as quick and painless as possible for both of you.

I worked on commission plus overrides, and I'd have much rather seen people writing more tickets instead of filling in addresses, but the decision was made way above my pay grade.

I used to work in retail and trust me, we hate having to ask as much as you hate being asked. It sucked. Please don't take it out on the cashiers. They just want to keep their jobs.

When I worked at a major book store chain, we had to push memberships on customers as they were checking out. Then there'd be various other things we had to ask. During the holidays we'd have a laundry list of questions to ask every single customer. And it was all monitored by store management and corporate. The managers at my store thought it was stupid too, but with corporate watching, they had to keep the pressure on us. Corporate even sent in secret shoppers to see if we were pushing memberships and asking for email addresses.

If someone was angry with me that I was asking too many questions, I'd politely give them the number to the corporate office and complain to them, because only the higher ups had any power to do anything.


Sorry for the rambling post. But after working in retail for so long when I was younger I know what it's like to be on the other side of the counter. When asked for your email, a polite "no thanks" and smile is all that's needed.