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This is an older story, from back in the day when I was a call center agent. For reference, I used to work in the call center of a catalog pet supply company.
We had these dog toys, they were giant plushy snakes, probably about 5 feet long and very thick, and made of very colorful material (bright green, purple, orange, blue, etc). They were advertised as being a great chew toy or tug-of-war toy.
I got a call from a woman once who was batshit crazy-upset over these toys. How could we POSSIBLY think that selling a toy like that is appropriate! Naturally, I was confused, so I asked her to clarify.
Apparently, wherever she was from (somewhere in the U.S., but I don't have the vaguest idea where anymore), there were poisonous snakes that were very deadly and many dogs in the area had been killed by being bitten by said snake. So why in the world would a pet supply company carry a toy snake designed for dogs! It was outrageous! Giving a dog a toy like that would only ENCOURAGE them to go near REAL snakes! What were we trying to do, encourage our pets to get killed?
She went on to say that she doesn't believe in using shock collars on dogs -- except for one occasion. When a dog is young, she would put a shock collar on it and then take it out to the yard, where she would have a dead snake waiting. She would let the curious pup approach the snake, and as soon as it got close enough, she would shock it, to teach it not to approach snakes. Said it worked on every dog she ever did it to.
Anyway, she demanded that we remove the snakes from our catalog at once and never sell them again. After being informed that I (and no one else in the call center, not even the managers) had absolutely no control over what we sold, she said that we had to, at LEAST, include a warning in the product description, something to tell customers that snakes were dangerous or something to that effect. She had a lawyer friend, you see, and according to him, a customer who bought one of our giant plushy snake toys for their dog, and then had their dog killed by a real snake, could take us to court over it, if we didn't include a warning with the toy snake.
I promised her that I would forward her suggestion on to management, and I did...we had a way of emailing "customer service comments" to managers, whether it be compliments or complaints or anything, and the managers read all of them and even took some of them into consideration (like if a lot of customers were requesting a certain brand of treat or whatever, managers would let the marketing department know and sometimes we started carrying them.) Usually the agent who sends the email doesn't get a direct reply back from management about it, but my manager came up to me the same day and said he'd received my customer service comment...we looked at each other for a moment...and both of us just cracked up.
Sadly, the snakes were removed from the catalog a few months after that incident...I really hope that woman didn't have anything to do with it. I doubt she did, but I have no idea; products were changed around all the time, based on how popular they were. I rather liked them, myself.
We had these dog toys, they were giant plushy snakes, probably about 5 feet long and very thick, and made of very colorful material (bright green, purple, orange, blue, etc). They were advertised as being a great chew toy or tug-of-war toy.
I got a call from a woman once who was batshit crazy-upset over these toys. How could we POSSIBLY think that selling a toy like that is appropriate! Naturally, I was confused, so I asked her to clarify.
Apparently, wherever she was from (somewhere in the U.S., but I don't have the vaguest idea where anymore), there were poisonous snakes that were very deadly and many dogs in the area had been killed by being bitten by said snake. So why in the world would a pet supply company carry a toy snake designed for dogs! It was outrageous! Giving a dog a toy like that would only ENCOURAGE them to go near REAL snakes! What were we trying to do, encourage our pets to get killed?
She went on to say that she doesn't believe in using shock collars on dogs -- except for one occasion. When a dog is young, she would put a shock collar on it and then take it out to the yard, where she would have a dead snake waiting. She would let the curious pup approach the snake, and as soon as it got close enough, she would shock it, to teach it not to approach snakes. Said it worked on every dog she ever did it to.
Anyway, she demanded that we remove the snakes from our catalog at once and never sell them again. After being informed that I (and no one else in the call center, not even the managers) had absolutely no control over what we sold, she said that we had to, at LEAST, include a warning in the product description, something to tell customers that snakes were dangerous or something to that effect. She had a lawyer friend, you see, and according to him, a customer who bought one of our giant plushy snake toys for their dog, and then had their dog killed by a real snake, could take us to court over it, if we didn't include a warning with the toy snake.
I promised her that I would forward her suggestion on to management, and I did...we had a way of emailing "customer service comments" to managers, whether it be compliments or complaints or anything, and the managers read all of them and even took some of them into consideration (like if a lot of customers were requesting a certain brand of treat or whatever, managers would let the marketing department know and sometimes we started carrying them.) Usually the agent who sends the email doesn't get a direct reply back from management about it, but my manager came up to me the same day and said he'd received my customer service comment...we looked at each other for a moment...and both of us just cracked up.
Sadly, the snakes were removed from the catalog a few months after that incident...I really hope that woman didn't have anything to do with it. I doubt she did, but I have no idea; products were changed around all the time, based on how popular they were. I rather liked them, myself.
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