I know it is not just me but have you noticed an abundance of surveys EVERYWHERE lately? I for one am getting tired of it. This constant need for companies to find out what you think has entered the annoying. This sounds almost like a rant that would be good over at http://cantankerousoldcoots.com, but today, it is here!
This survey thing is not new. I have been bugged for the past few years with them. The first ones were the phone surveys. They call you up and ask you to rate your last visit to X. Sometimes I answer these when it has to do with the hospital and my daughter. It was however one of these surveys that prompted this post. They called for my wife and I really don’t know what they wanted but I told him she would never be available. In hindsight, that was probably mean but he was a douche on the phone.
Now they have surveys to win gift cards on damn near ever receipt that you can get. Most of them are longer than the receipt itself. I bought a bike tire and a donut at Walmart yesterday and the receipt was 14 inches long. Ridiculous. A waste of my time and the paper it is printed on. Like I really have time to call you up and answer inane questions for the 1 in a million chance that I can get a $50 gift card.
I did call one on a receipt from PetsMart the other day for a coupon so that I could get a free fish, and then I proceeded to lose the receipt. I knew I shouldn’t have bothered.
The other thing that is really pissing me off lately is the pop up or lightbox surveys that come up at what seems like every damn website that is not a blog! I am so annoyed with certain companies that do this that I don’t even go to their website anymore. It just seems like every time you turn on a site, there is a box of varying size begging you to complete your survey.
Even at Disneyland they want you to complete a survey. My wife signed up and I thought “Ok not too bad”. That was in the first part of October last year. Last week the survey came into my email box. I had forgotten about it so I clicked into the survey. It didn’t take very long but it was a huge whine about why we hadn’t been back to Disneyland since we left in October! I don’t know about you, but my kids would live to go to Disneyland every month. There is just no way to afford that!
Which brings me to the online, “Get paid to take survey’s” scams. I have signed up for several “reputable” companies that you have seen and or heard about on TV. Not just infomercials, shows like the NBC Nightly News and the like. Here is the thing and the reason I have dumped most of them from my inbox lately. I can’t seem to find ANY of their surveys I “Qualify” for.
I have taken the time to fill out all of their information, all of the demographic stuff which brings the “you have a new survey” emails. When I click into the survey it gets about 6 questions into the thing and gives me the “Were sorry but you aren’t good enough for your opinion to count” message. I have begun to think that they only want the information from the first of the survey and that is how they get out of paying. Cheap corporate bastards.
So, if you are out there and you like taking surveys, go for it. If you are working with online paid surveys, go for it, you can have my share. If you are a company and need to have a survey to figure out how people like your stuff, maybe you are not paying as much attention to your customers as you should be.
I have run a couple of surveys in the past on here and have had very minimal response. The only reason I can figure out why there are so many surveys out there is so that the .75% that actually get answered have at least some value to advertisers.
I for one am tired of the surveys.
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Thanks for reading!
-Justin
