Monday, February 9, 2009

Sam's Club Auto-Calling about Peanut Butter Recall?

Last week my wife said we got an automated phone call from Sam's Club say that their records showed that in the past we had bought a particular brand of breakfast bar that was being recalled, presumably because of the tainted peanut butter that's been giving people salmonella and which had killed, as last I heard, eight or so people. I haven't heard of this before, but with a food product as wide-spread as this, I guess auto-dialling people with this message is a good idea.

The big thing that's curious, I guess, is that they keep records this detailed. It is a little big brother-ish, but I'm not complaining. We could have brought any of these breakfast bars we had left back to the store to get a refund, but these were purchased in December for our Christmas road trip to Colorado.
I tried for a bit to find some new stories or references about Sam's doing this. This article is about Costco doing this same automated phone call warning about the tainted peanut butter:

This Is Costco Calling. Put Down That Sandwich!
Written by Fred J. Aun
January 28th, 2009

That's from some industry-insider web site about retail technology. It came up, I guess, because of a Sam'c Club ad in the margin. The article says that Costco's system only gears up for a "Level 1" product recall, and that then their search that data and outsource the actual calling to a company specializing in that, and which can send up to 500,000 call an hour. I guess that sort of warning call is exempt from the do-not-call registry and law?

Ok, and further down the results list on Google are some other hits from misc blogs and stuff about people getting the call from Sam's Club about making these calls about a wide assortment of products with peanuts in them.

And a completely unrelated and random discovery while searching for information about this - "automatic phone call" helped, as I had just guessed at the jargon "autocall" which must be some hacker or computer jargon because, even combined with sam's club and peanut butter, it turns up a lot of weird sites that on which is just appears in a long list of words. For example, this search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=sam%27s+club+peanut+butter+autocall

after the first hit, which is from the Sam's Club web page, but doesn't includ the word "autocall", most of the hits are from pages like this:

http://www.theargon.com/achilles/wordlists/random.txt

Which is a page consisting entirely of text like these lines:
funded EPILOG EPISEPT EPISTAT EPMA EPPS EPQ EPS EQS EQS/PC EQUANT-PC EQUATE EQUORM ERA ERDAS ERICA ERLS ERM ERUMS ERUMS--A ES ES202 ESD ESMR ESP ESPRIT ESRC ESRC/DTI ESS ESSs ESTES ET ETRANK ETS EURECA EURO EV EV1 EVAL EVM EVMS EVOP EVOP-type EVPI EWMA EX EX-TRAN EXACTB EXAX2 EXCAD EXECUSTAT EXPERIMENTOR EXPFIT EXPLOR EXPLOR4 EXPLORA EXPLORE EXPOSMOO EXPRESS EXTENDED EXp EY Early Early-step Earnings Earth Earthquakes Easily Easily-stated Easing powder Easterlin Eastside player Easy score Easy-Link EasyPlot Eating Eberhardt Eberhart-Gardner Eberl Echinococcus Eckler Ecological Econometrics Economical Economically
I guess that's text for some password guesser or something?

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