Bob Bulmash hates telemarketers–he calls them “the most annoying pest since the invention of the housefly.” But he’s getting back at them.
But getting an unlisted number cost $12.50 a year, and Bulmash didn’t see why he should have to pay money so telemarketers couldn’t call him. “If you’re walking down the street and you don’t have a sign on your head saying ‘Do not pour water on me,’ then somebody walking down the street with a bucket of water can pour water on you lawfully?” he says. “Why should you have to tell somebody not to do something which they themselves know you don’t want to have done to you?”
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This time he handled the situation differently. He wrote a letter to Sears saying that he’d allow them to use his telephone, but only if they paid $100 each time.
That’s when Bulmash got the idea for Private Citizen. For a $20 yearly membership fee, he sends a do-not-call request to more than 1,500 of the biggest telemarketing firms in the country and all their branches, which includes companies such as Merrill Lynch and Century 21 Real Estate. He estimates there are 20,000 telemarketing firms in the country, including local fly-by-nights, though Amy Blankenship, director of consumer media relations at the 5,000-member Direct Marketing Association, says no one knows how many there are.
So far Barbara Joyce, a 59-year-old member of Private Citizen who lives in Seattle, has taken home $8,290. She says she used to get two to three calls a day. “I was very irritated that I had a phone in my home for my benefit that I was paying for,” she says, “and people were calling me at their convenience, pulling me away from whatever I might be doing, whether I was up to my elbows in Ajax scrubbing the shower or enjoying a lovely, leisurely dinner with my family. It didn’t matter to them what I was doing. They called me at their convenience to try to sell me goods and services that I had no interest in. And I wanted them to stop calling me.”
She remembers that after one hallway settlement she was afraid the telemarketer’s check would bounce, so she took it straight to his bank to cash. “It was $1,065, and I stood there and watched the teller count out hundred-dollar bills,” she says. “It really hit home. I mean, she’s counting out hundred-dollar bills, and she gives me ten of them! And I thought, this is real money.”
Asked whether people have a right to make a living marketing insurance or lawn services or cemetery plots or lightbulbs the most efficient way they can, Bulmash says, “Yes, people want insurance. Yes, people want a lightbulb. You know, people want liposuction, but that doesn’t mean a doctor can run into my house, throw me on the ground, and start sucking my fat out!”
