It is no more difficult to reply to the USCG renewal letter than to the "maritime" one. The ".us" domain name use is a particularly sleazy choice as well.
Absolutely, it is all very calculated. Personally, I find it hard to believe it works on boat owners, since, as you point out, the USCG sends their own notice out and the owner had to have gone through the process at least once already. I own an Internet domain and recently got an email for registering it with the search engines so people can finds my site. They worded it like it was official, coming due, and I'd lose my domain if I didn't do it right away. It was even harder to decipher, but the wording was there to be able to claim they were offering a legitimate third party service.
You want to know what I find sleazy? Buying "family" sized cleaners that actually are marked up to higher per ounce prices than the convenient sized middle quantity. Check it out. Marketers get customers use to the larger quantities being cheaper per unit, then mark everything up a little, but the family sized jug gets marked up more. You grab it off the shelf assuming you are getting a better deal than buying the smaller volume. You don't bother comparing because it is the "value" size and you were going to buy it anyhow. They do it with cereal, sugar and flour, rice, detergents. My wife got angry at me for coming home with a dozen of these little tiny bottles of Palmolive dish soap once, because she thought I was wasting money by not buying the giant refill bottles. The side by side comparison took a lot of my time too, because they used different unit measurements and I had to convert.
- Will (Dragonfly)
