File this under "Things that make your brain ache": Robo-calls. The business kind, not the political kind. I realize that they aren't a new phenomenon. I remember picking up a "free vacation" scam-call back in the 1980s.
It really doesn't matter that P.T. Barnum denied saying "There's a sucker born every minute" because too many folks--some with no more than access to email--have latched onto that idea as truth.
Understand that Barnum was active at the middle of the 1800s, when the world population numbered around 1.2 billion. That figure is currently hovering somewhere around 6.8 billion, about 5.67 times what it was in 1850. If, in the middle of the nineteenth century, sixty suckers were born every hour, that's 1440 per day, and 525,945 suckers per year, accounting for leap years. Multiply that by the factor of 5.67 to factor in the population growth and that's 2,982,111 born in 2009. Figuring for a birth rate of 20.18 live births per 1,000 people worldwide, we can guesstimate that 148,240,000 were born last year.
So, if we divide the total number of births from 2008 by the number of suckers allegedly born in that time, the percentage of the population that can be termed "suckers" is 2.0116777%, if we assume that the level of gullibility--even in this age of Snopes.com--hasn't changed since the day when Barnum pitched his first big-top. Which is, indubitably, a large enough target for any mass-marketer. Unless we assume that suckers are evenly distributed throughout the world population. If nearly eighty percent of the world's population lives--if you can dignify it with that term--on ten dollars a day or less, that doesn't leave a whole lot of bling for whatever's being pedaled. And that assumes that the sucker in question can afford a phone in the first place. So that leaves something less than half of one percent. Which, in some segments of direct mail marketing, is a livable return.
However, if you're running a shady operation, you're racing against the time when you'll be run out of town or dragged off to the hoosegow. And if you have to offshore those operations to skirt the law, the costs (and thus the conversion ratio required to support them) will increase. So I almost have to wonder whether the firms actually making the robo-calls are in fact the vanity-publishers of the marketing world. It'd be nice to think that the would-be scammers ultimately lose their shorts to their get-rich-quick ambitions.
But, that's probably wishful thinking--and highly oversimplified, just like the assumption-laden back-of-the-envelope calculations above. I'm Midwestern enough that hanging up on a human being without at least the courtesy of a "No, thank you" is pretty much unthinkable. But a pre-recorded voice? Click.
