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Black Friday / Cyber Monday Emails

I’m so very happy when Black Friday & Cyber Monday arrive. It’s like homecoming weekend in my Gmail account. Companies I haven’t heard from in years – sometimes only ever interacted with once – send me AMAZING deals that I need to respond to NOW!

> The island resort that my wife & I stayed at for one night, 6 years ago.

> Software I downloaded (and soon deleted) when I was still working (8 years).

> Vinyl record company I bought one gift from about 5 years ago.

> A restaurant we once made a reservation for near Daytona Beach (2 years).

> Party store my son worked at when he was still in High School (Class of 2016).

> Travel Health Insurance Company be used when we went to Israel & Jordan in 2018

It’s not that we don’t do a good job of policing our email address. I am frequently unsubscribing from companies that barrage our email account. Still, there is something about Black Friday and Cyber Monday that brings greetings from companies we haven’t heard from in forever.

What’s the most irrelevant email in your box this morning?!

Image: Midjourney AI

5 thoughts on “Black Friday / Cyber Monday Emails”

  1. I received around 25 Cyber Monday ‘Deals’ this morning. The most useless was to update the software on an LG Big Screen that I bought years ago to enable a capability called Thin-Q, which will allow me to ‘earn’ special incentives. A software update to install adware on my Big Screen. No Thanks!

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    1. No thanks, indeed! Those ads on your smart TV have become a big business. Amazon supposedly makes close to $10B a year in revenue by controlling the start-up screen on their Fire TV sticks & boxes. Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc pay them money for favored position on the screen and to feature their shows.

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      1. One of my goals a couple years ago was to make my house as commercial free as possible. Switching from a satellite package to selectively buying streaming channels (that we actually watch) saves us both a lot of monthly cost and from having to view commercials.

        My Big Screen is really down level on software, so I am missing out on the ad-ware. The only place I have seen attempts to sell us is on our Roku device that keeps trying to get us to sign up for Hulu. This brings up the question, what do I do when this TV bites the dust. I am sort of thinking of buying a Monitor without all the Smart Features to avoid the barrage of ads.

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      2. We have a Amazon FIRE TV and the “ads” it serves up aren’t like regular ads. They get ad revenue for the shows they feature on the front page and the order they put the streaming service tiles. It doesn’t seem like an ad, although the streamers will pay big $$$ to have their tile featured more prominently. Studios do the same within Netflix. Everyone wants the best position on the first page.

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